SUPERHOT VR now follows your eyes on Steam Frame to cut its rendering load

SUPERHOT VR has added support for eye-tracked foveated rendering on its Steam Frame standalone build, enabled by default. The SUPERHOT Team posted it to Steam on September 29 as "just a small patch today", signed off by Pawel from the studio, and it is the second Steam Frame-focused change in a fortnight.

What that actually does

Foveated rendering drops detail outside the part of the image a player is looking at. Tying it to eye tracking means the sharp region moves with the eyes instead of sitting in a fixed patch, which is the version that buys performance without an obvious drop in quality. On a standalone headset, where the rendering happens on the device rather than on a PC, that headroom is worth more than it is on a tethered setup.

The run-up to Steam Frame

The groundwork went in with Patch 1.70 on September 15, which the studio described as getting the game ready for the Steam Frame release. That update reworked controller-movement detection with more precise time calculation, so involuntary hand shakes are filtered out while very slow movements still register and advance time properly - a change the team said also lowers the chance of losing controller tracking. It made the game boot straight into interactive gameplay by disabling the piOS booting sequence, and it turned off the diagonal scan-line effect by default, on the grounds that VR resolutions have improved enough that the trick it was papering over is no longer a problem. A setting to turn the scan lines back on was added for anyone who wants them.

PC gets the same work

Rather than keeping the improvements on the new platform, SUPERHOT applied the 1.70 changes to the PC version too, to keep the two builds in line. The studio called them all straight upgrades but left a version rollback available for anyone who disagrees.