Half-Life: Alyx got a surprise update on October 26, and the headline item is the kind of feature that usually ships with a new headset rather than a six-year-old game. Valve’s patch notes add a setting under Advanced Performance to enable Foveated Rendering on desktop, which renders the part of the image you are looking at in full detail and the periphery at lower resolution. Valve says it “can increase rendering performance” and that you should “enable eye-tracking on your headset for best results.”
You need a GTX 16 or RTX 20 card or newer, or Vulkan on AMD
The setting is gated by hardware. On DirectX it supports NVIDIA GTX 16-series and RTX 20-series cards and newer. AMD cards are supported only if you launch the game with the -vulkan option. Valve has published a guide with more detail, linked from the notes. The “best results” wording suggests the setting also works on headsets without eye tracking, presumably with the sharp region fixed to the centre of each lens, but the gain in performance and the quality cost both depend on the sharp spot following your eyes, which is what the caveat is about.
Steam Frame gets stencil tagging for native play
The second line in the notes is aimed squarely at Valve’s own headset. Alyx now enables “stencil buffer tagging when running natively on Steam Frame to help improve reprojection quality.” The Steam Frame ships with eye tracking that Valve has so far used for foveated streaming from a PC, and every headset comes with Half-Life: Alyx in the box. This update puts that eye tracking to work for rendering rather than video encoding in the one game every Steam Frame owner has, and it tightens up the native, standalone version of Alyx at the same time.
The rest of the patch is housekeeping: several rendering crashes common in Workshop content are fixed, and the “Gnome Alone” achievement, for carrying the gnome through the whole game, now unlocks reliably. Players in the VR subreddit mostly wanted to know whether the foveated setting does anything on PSVR2 with its own eye tracking, which Valve’s notes do not address. We will add Valve’s guide details and any Steam Frame-specific numbers to the hub as they come in.
