Half-Life: Alyx Adds Foveated Rendering on PC and Sharper Reprojection on Steam Frame
A new Advanced Performance setting turns on foveated rendering for supported GPUs, the game now tags the stencil buffer when running natively on Steam Frame, and workshop crashes are fixed.
Valve released a Half-Life: Alyx update on October 26, 2026 (posted at 5:49 PM CT). It has four changes, and two of them are about getting more performance out of VR headsets.
Foveated rendering on desktop
There’s a new setting under Advanced Performance that turns on foveated rendering on desktop for supported hardware. Foveated rendering draws full detail where you’re looking and less in your peripheral vision. Valve says it “can increase rendering performance.” It doesn’t give any numbers.
- DirectX: NVIDIA GTX 16xx and newer or RTX 20xx and newer.
- AMD: Launch the game with the -vulkan option.
- Eye tracking: Valve says to turn on eye tracking on your headset for best results. It links to a Steam Community guide with more details.
Steam Frame reprojection
When the game runs natively on Steam Frame, it now uses stencil buffer tagging to help improve reprojection quality. Reprojection fills in frames when the game can’t hit the headset’s refresh rate, so better reprojection should mean fewer visual artifacts when performance dips.
Fixes
- Workshop: Several rendering crashes common in workshop content are fixed.
- Achievement: “Gnome Alone” no longer fails to unlock for some users.
Steam Frame sidebar
New to Steam Frame? GamingOnLinux has a Steam Frame tips and tricks guide worth bookmarking.
Source: Valve, Half-Life: Alyx October 26, 2026 Update. Coverage: GamingOnLinux.
Sources
- Valve, Half-Life: Alyx October 26, 2026 Update steamstore-a.akamaihd.net
- GamingOnLinux gamingonlinux.com
