Valve put up their Steam Year In Review 2025 and initially, they made it seem like their hardware plans were a lot more uncertain but they've since clarified.
alyx can run on bricks I swear. well not really but if the gpu has 8gb vram I’m almost certain even the slowest of them will work. anything that can be baked is, and it looks excellent.
The Frame supports foveated rendering so that will help reduce the requirements a bit. Additionally, while the game looks impressive, it’s mostly corridors and the like so it’s not doing a huge amount of GPU work.
I might be remembering incorrectly, but didn’t the Frame support foviated streaming not rendering? As in, isn’t foviated rendering a game specific thing, not a headset specific thing?
The headset has eye tracking to make it possible, but yes, apps have to implement foveated rendering for it to work.
I think it is possible for the VR compositor to do some eye tracking optimizations for the app without the app doing special stuff, but I don’t know how much that helps (or if it’s even implemented in SteamVR).
I’m impressed the Steam Frame can run Half Life Alyx.
It can!? Like standalone? That’s crazy impressive! I’m buying one regardless but if it’s that powerful it’s exceeding my expectations.
https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/valve-steam-frame-battery/
alyx can run on bricks I swear. well not really but if the gpu has 8gb vram I’m almost certain even the slowest of them will work. anything that can be baked is, and it looks excellent.
The Frame supports foveated rendering so that will help reduce the requirements a bit. Additionally, while the game looks impressive, it’s mostly corridors and the like so it’s not doing a huge amount of GPU work.
I might be remembering incorrectly, but didn’t the Frame support foviated streaming not rendering? As in, isn’t foviated rendering a game specific thing, not a headset specific thing?
The headset has eye tracking to make it possible, but yes, apps have to implement foveated rendering for it to work.
I think it is possible for the VR compositor to do some eye tracking optimizations for the app without the app doing special stuff, but I don’t know how much that helps (or if it’s even implemented in SteamVR).
It supports both, but yeah, for rendering it will require updates to the game.
I played it on a 2060. Low graphics settings, yes, but it was playable. As far as I can see Valve didn’t say what graphics settings they used.
I managed to play it half decently on a 1050ti lol. I would say about 60-75% ran at good framerates.