KRVR, a $15 visionOS app, lets you play any SteamVR game from your PC on Apple Vision Pro with foveated streaming.
This is not the only visionOS app for playing your SteamVR games, and nor is it even the first to support the foveated streaming feature Apple introduced in visionOS 26.4. ALVR, which has been available on the App Store since a few months after the M2 Vision Pro launched, supports playing SteamVR games from your PC, and in March a Canadian software engineer released Clear XR, which lets you play OpenXR games from your PC. Both are free and open source, with the ALVR client available on the App Store and Clear XR available on TestFlight, while both have a streaming server on GitHub.
KRVR is a paid closed-source app, which, with its most recent updates, delivers the two best aspects of ALVR and Clear XR in one solution: it lets you play any SteamVR game, even non-OpenXR titles, with foveated streaming to maximize visual quality in the region of the display you’re currently looking at.
As with Clear XR, KRVR’s developer leverages Nvidia’s CloudXR SDK, which has full ready-to-go support for Apple’s foveated streaming feature.
Valve’s depiction of foveated streaming.
What Is Foveated Streaming?
Guided by eye tracking, foveated streaming prioritizes image resolution and compression quality where your eye is currently looking.
It’s a term you may have heard in the context of Valve’s Steam Frame, where it’s a fundamental always-on feature of its PC VR streaming offering, delivered via the USB PC wireless adapter by default.
Note that foveated streaming is not the same as foveated rendering, though the two techniques can be used alongside each other. While foveated rendering involves the title on the host device actually rendering the area of each frame you’re currently looking at with higher resolution, foveated streaming refers to sending that area to the headset with higher image quality than the rest of the frame. Foveated rendering happens in the game engine, while foveated streaming is applied to already finished frames.
The $15 app has a relatively polished interface and a few standout features compared to ALVR, which still doesn’t support foveated streaming, and Clear XR, which hasn’t been updated since March:
- Passthrough Cutouts: Similar to Virtual Desktop on Quest, KRVR lets you trace out portions of your space, which will display real-world passthrough instead of VR. This lets you bring your racing wheel, HOTAS, desk, or other physical areas of your room into VR. You can edit these passthrough cutout zones at any time.
- PC Desktop: You can view and interact with your PC monitors, with multi-monitor support. While playing a VR game, you can interact with your PC’s other physical monitors.
As with ALVR and Clear XR, Sony’s PlayStation VR2 Sense tracked controllers are fully supported, though you can also use other input devices like a gamepad or mouse and keyboard.
The tradeoff of using Nvidia’s CloudXR SDK is that it exclusively supports Nvidia’s Ada and Blackwell GPU architectures, meaning RTX 40-series and 50-series graphics cards. The current PC I’m using has an RTX 3090, so unfortunately, I can’t test KRVR at the moment.
If you do have the required GPU and an Apple Vision Pro and want to try it, you can find the KRVR visionOS client on the App Store for $15, and the Windows PC server app on GitHub – though note that the source code is not available.
X-Plane and iRacing also recently launched their own dedicated visionOS clients for their PC VR simulators, also leveraging Nvidia’s CloudXR, offering seamless automatic connection as well as automatic alignment and passthrough cutout of your physical peripherals, your HOTAS or racing wheel setup.
