Apple Vision Pro just got a new update that brings Foveated Streaming to the headset, essentially the same bandwidth-saving feature Valve is bringing to its upcoming Steam Frame headset.
The News
As noted by VR supply chain analyst Brad Lynch, foveated streaming has arrived on Vision Pro via the latest visionOS 26.4 beta update, which landed on February 16th.
Much like Valve’s foveated streaming solution for Steam Frame, Apple’s implementation uses Vision Pro’s eye-tracking to optimize the streamed image to serve up the highest quality at the very center of your view, according to recent Apple developer documentation.
If you have an existing virtual reality game, experience, or application built for desktop computers or a cloud server, you can stream it to Apple Vision Pro with the Foveated Streaming framework.
Foveated Streaming allows your endpoint to stream high quality content only where necessary based on information about the approximate region where the person is looking, ensuring performance.
Additionally, Apple notes that on Vision Pro, foveated streaming allows for a sort of hybrid approach to computing: you can display visionOS spatial content alongside streaming content, such as a flight simulator rendering a cockpit using RealityKit while processor-intensive landscapes are streamed from a remote computer to the device.
The key difference is the focus and implementation. Valve seems to be applying Foveated Rendering globally, meaning all Steam apps will benefit out of the box. Valve’s focus is also on local PC streaming, which is done via a direct Wi-Fi 6E connection.
Instead, Vision Pro apps and games need to be specifically integrated with Apple’s version of the technology, with Apple additionally supporting NVIDIA’s CloudXR SDK, which allows developers of existing VR apps created for desktop computers as well as cloud servers to stream to Vision Pro.
My Take
On the face of it, it looks like Apple is matching Valve punch-for-punch with foveated streaming, although I wouldn’t take this as Apple meaningfully looking to compete with the upcoming Steam Frame on the consumer end of things.
The $3,500 Vision Pro M5 refresh likely won’t come down in price anytime soon, and I don’t suspect Apple is trying to get a bunch of PC VR developers onboard to create consumer-facing versions of their apps that will need to be specifically integrated with Vision Pro foveated streaming.
If I were an enterprise user though, I would may be pretty interested in the new update, as this opens up one of the key features Steam Frame is bringing to the table.
Being able to push more compute-intensive apps to a headset they likely already own could stop some companies from justifying a Steam Frame(s) purchase, which Apple is all too happy to oblige—especially as the recent memory and storage crisis has seen components shoot up in price so dramatically, causing Valve to take reassess pricing and release date of Steam Frame.
