Valve has ported Half-Life: Alyx to ARM, and it’s free with Steam Frame

Valve launched the Steam Frame as its first headset since 2019 and is including a copy of Half-Life: Alyx with every unit. Rather than relying on a connected Windows PC, Valve rebuilt Alyx to run natively on the headset’s ARM64 architecture, using the device’s Qualcomm Snapdragon Gen 3 processor.

Valve credits the Steam Frame’s built-in eye-tracking and foveated rendering for making the port viable, combined with the headset’s 16GB of VRAM. A Valve spokesperson, Kaci Aitchison, said foveated rendering let the company focus full resolution where the wearer is looking and avoid changing game assets. The company also says it invested roughly a year of additional software work inside the Vulkan drivers and SteamVR to enable the port, with much of that effort benefiting other titles that run on the system.

In hands-on impressions the port shows some graphical compromises compared with a desktop PC, but still feels like a full PC VR experience rather than a typical standalone title; mods and existing saves also worked immediately. The Steam Frame can also play Windows-built games through Valve’s translation and emulation layers and run Android-based headset apps through a compatibility layer called Lepton.

Valve has avoided confirming whether it will develop new VR games alongside the hardware; the company previously said it stopped building multiple full VR titles and had no new VR content in development as of 2025. Separately, Digital Foundry reported that the native Alyx build renders at a base 36 fps and that the headset can run at 72Hz or 108Hz, which function as 2x and 3x multipliers respectively, along with reprojection techniques to smooth motion.