Half-Life: Alyx patch adds foveated rendering support a mere 6 years after the game's release

Half-Life: Alyx appeared to be all done and dusted, with no major updates or patches since 2022. Then along came the Steam Frame and we've a whole new port of the game for its Snapdragon processor. The good news is that you don't need a Steam Frame to benefit from this recent flurry of activity either, as foveated rendering support has now been added to the PC version of the game for a bunch of PCVR headsets.

In the latest patch, Valve has added the option to toggle foveated rendering within the settings menu of the PC version of Half-Life: Alyx.

"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."

As Valve notes in the linked documentation, you can technically enable foveated rendering on any virtual reality …