Half-Life: Alyx updated to bring Foveated Rendering on desktop

27 Oct 2026 at 8:37 am UTC | Last updated: 27 Oct 2026 at 8:43 am UTC
By Liam Squires-Hand

Valve are still adding in improvements to the excellent VR game Half-Life: Alyx, with the latest update out now. With Foveated Rendering on desktop now available, many more gamers across different VR kits should be able to use it.

From the changelog:

Key Features

• Add a setting under Advanced Performance to enable Foveated Rendering on desktop for supported hardware (for DirectX: NVIDIA GTX 16XX+, RTX 20XX+; AMD requires launching with -vulkan). Can increase rendering performance. Enable eye-tracking on your headset for best results. More information here.
• Enable stencil buffer tagging when running natively on Steam Frame to help improve reprojection quality.
• Fix several rendering crashes common in workshop content.
• Fix "Gnome Alone" achievement failing to unlock for some users.

In the linked guide it notes:

The VR headset must support eye tracking in their SteamVR driver, here are example of SteamVR drivers capable of it:

• SteamLink on Valve Steam Frame, Meta Quest Pro, HTC VIVE Focus Vision, Play For Dream MR, Samsung Galaxy XR, Pico 4 Pro/Enterprise.
• Virtual Desktop on Meta Quest Pro, HTC VIVE Focus Vision, Play For Dream MR, Samsung Galaxy XR.
• Bigscreen Beyond 2e.
• Oasis for Windows Mixed Reality on HP Reverb G2 Omnicept.
• Somnium VR1 Visionary, Titan and Ultimate edition.
• Apple Vision Pro with KRVR.

More headsets are capable of sending eye tracking data to SteamVR with additional 3rd party drivers:

• Sony Playstation VR2 with Bnuuy Solutions's PSVR2 Toolkit.
• Pimax Crystal series and Dream Air series with Sboys3's CustomHeadsetOpenVRor Pimax-EyeTracker-SteamVR
• Varjo Aero, VR and XR series with Varjo-EyeTracker-SteamVR.
• (probably more that we don't know about!).

Steam Deck 🟥 UnsupportedPlatform: ⚛ Proton / Wine (Windows)Release Date: 📅 23rd March 2020Devs:ValveOfficial links:Steam 🌐 External Sources: store.steampowered.com Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com. Tags: Proton, Steam Frame, Action, FPS, Steam, SteamVR, Valve, Virtual Reality (VR) | Apps: Half-Life: Alyx 2 Likes Some you may have missed, popular articles from the last month:Linux kernel 7.3 is out with some nice improvements for gamingElectronic Arts (EA) to shut down BioWare and cancel the next Mass EffectHalf-Life remake Black Mesa has a Beta for a big update with a new UI and controller supportValve fix Zero Company crashing on Steam Machine with the latest major game update All posts need to follow our rules. Please hit the Report Flag icon on any post that breaks the rules or contains illegal / harmful content. Readers can also email us for any issues or concerns.