Porting Half-Life: Alyx to Steam Frame: How Valve's Engineers Went from "There's No Way" to Shipping Standalone

Foveated rendering, lots of driver work and 16GB of RAM.

When the Steam Frame was announced, the idea that a high-end VR showcase like Half-Life: Alyx would run natively on a modestly powerful, ARM-based headset seemed far-fetched - and Valve set expectations accordingly. Even earlier, the mood internally was simple: "this is never going to work." Yet, as Valve engineers used Alyx as a test-bed for standalone games on the headset, progress came surprisingly swiftly, and Alyx is shipping alongside Frame as a fully native game on the system.