GoKawiilis a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
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Today, Valve is launching its first headset since 2019 — the new Steam Frame — while dodging our questions about whether it’ll ever make another VR game to go with it. But buyers of the $1,059 gadget will get one flagship VR game anyhow, and it’s great.
Every Steam Frame comes with a copy of 2020’s Half-Life: Alyx, one of the best VR games yet made and a good game, period, and you won’t even need a desktop PC — because Valve has ported the entire game to ARM64 so it can run natively on the Frame’s Qualcomm Snapdragon Gen 3 chip.
That’s no mean feat: This was a game that required a VR-ready Windows desktop or laptop with a midrange graphics card back in 2020, now running on what’s effectively souped-up smartphone silicon. It even supports all the mods and extra levels that fans have built! My mods and saves were waiting for me the moment I fired it up.
The port certainly has compromises in graphical fidelity compared to running it on my desktop, but it manages to feel like a full PC VR game on the Frame in a way that native Meta Quest titles never really have, and without removing any objects or assets. Typically, standalone VR games feel emptier.
Valve says (via spokesperson Kaci Aitchison) that’s because the Steam Frame’s built-in eye-tracking cameras unlock foveated rendering — a technique that gives you full resolution where your eyes are actually looking, instead of wasting computing resources on the parts of the image where you’re not:
While we initially didn’t think HL:A running natively on the Steam Frame was likely to be possible, the combination of Foveated Rendering & Eye Tracking turned out to be a silver bullet that enabled us to make it work. The Steam Frame’s 16GB VRAM was also a critical piece, allowing us to avoid having to change any assets, or needing to degrade the gameplay experience.
See how crisp Alyx’s hand is? That’s because that’s where I’m looking. I don’t notice that anything else is low resolution, because as soon as I look, it’s sharp! Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge
The lightsaber mod works, and so does foveated rendering — again, I don’t notice the low resolution because it’s in my peripheral view. Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge An example of extreme foveated rendering in the Goldeneye mod. Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge
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