Alyx running too heavy
What this fixes: Half-Life: Alyx running too heavy on your GPU in VR. Who it’s for: PC players on a supported graphics card, ideally with a headset that has eye tracking. Verified against Valve’s October 26, 2026 update notes and the linked Steam Community guide.
Foveated rendering is the one performance setting in Alyx you won’t find unless you go looking. Valve’s guide says it is turned off by default in the PC version, and the control sits behind a small gear icon rather than on the main Performance screen.
Check your graphics card first
Valve’s October 26, 2026 update notes add a setting under Advanced Performance to enable foveated rendering on desktop for supported hardware. For DirectX, that means NVIDIA GTX 16XX and newer or RTX 20XX and newer. For AMD, the notes say the game has to be launched with -vulkan. The notes add that it can increase rendering performance, and recommend enabling eye tracking on your headset for best results.
The Steam Community guide goes a step further: AMD and Intel graphics card users can only use foveated rendering in Half-Life: Alyx on PC when running the game in Vulkan mode.
Turn it on in the game’s settings
- Launch Half-Life: Alyx.
- Go to Options, then Performance.
- Select the gear icon at the bottom left to open the Advanced Performance options.
- Switch on the Foveated Rendering setting.
Valve says the out-of-the-box settings should work for most players and there’s no need to configure foveated rendering further. The guide does document some internal settings (CVars) for people who like to tinker; we’d leave those alone unless you have a specific reason.
AMD and Intel: switch the game to Vulkan
- In your Steam Library, right-click Half-Life: Alyx and open Properties, then General.
- In Launch Options, enter
-vulkan. - Close and restart the game, then follow the in-game steps above.
Heads up: this guide covers the Windows desktop client as described in the sources above, and we haven’t tested these steps ourselves. If the game misbehaves after you change graphics modes, a clean GPU driver reinstall with DDU is the general reset we’d try before anything more drastic.
Eye tracking is optional, but it’s where the setting earns its keep
Valve’s patch notes say to enable eye tracking on your headset for best results. The Steam Community guide lists, per headset, the software that supplies eye tracking to the game. Valve’s own Index isn’t on that list, which is one more reason we’d think twice about the discontinued Index’s last-stock sale if foveated rendering is what you’re after.
| Headset | Supported driver(s) per the guide |
|---|---|
| Valve Steam Frame | Steam Link |
| Apple Vision Pro | KRVR |
| Bigscreen Beyond 2e | Bigscreen Beyond Utility |
| HP Reverb G2 Omnicept | Oasis for Windows Mixed Reality |
| HTC VIVE Focus Vision | Steam Link; Virtual Desktop |
| Meta Quest Pro | Steam Link; Virtual Desktop |
| Pico 4 Pro/Enterprise | Steam Link |
| Pimax Dream Air and Crystal | Pimax Play + Pimax-EyeTracker-SteamVR; Sboys3’s CustomHeadsetOpenVR |
| Play For Dream MR | Steam Link; Virtual Desktop |
| Samsung Galaxy XR | Steam Link; Virtual Desktop |
| Somnium VR1 | VR1 Tool |
| Sony PlayStation VR 2 | PlayStation VR2 App + PSVR2 Toolkit |
| Varjo Aero, VR and XR series | Varjo Base + Varjo-EyeTracker-SteamVR |
Setup for each driver is covered in the guide itself. We’d check that your headset appears in the table before spending an evening on this, because the card requirements alone don’t tell you whether you’ll see the best results.
Sources checked October 28, 2026: Valve’s October 26, 2026 Half-Life: Alyx update notes on Steam, and the Half-Life: Alyx foveated rendering guide on Steam Community.
