No Man's Sky Cosmos Adds Foveated Rendering to PC VR, and a Fix for PlayStation Move

The Cosmos patch notes run long. Somewhere in the Rendering section, immediately after an entry about Intel XeSS 3 and another about NVIDIA DLSS4.5, this is sitting there with no more ceremony than either of them:

Added support for foveated rendering on PCVR. Utilising eye-tracking technology, foveated rendering concentrates rendering resources at the centre of your vision, sharpening and beautifying the details you focus on.

Two sentences, and no bullet anywhere in the announcement Hello Games posted the same morning. No Man's Sky now has a PC VR rendering path it did not have yesterday, and Hello Games filed it right after two upscalers.

What that line actually buys you

If you have not run into the idea before: a headset draws a wide, very dense image, and your eye only resolves real detail in a small cone at the middle of it. Everything in your periphery is being rendered at full quality for nobody. Track where the eye is pointed, drop resolution everywhere it is not, and a meaningful slice of your GPU budget comes back to the part of the frame you are actually looking at. On a game that eats hardware the way this one does, that is not a nicety.

Then read the second sentence again. Utilising eye-tracking technology. Your PC headset has to track your eyes, and the list of PC headsets that do is short. Alex Reeves made the case in April, reviewing the Bigscreen Beyond 2, that dynamic foveated rendering on a 13-megapixel headset "is not a luxury, it is a practical requirement." He was talking about running sims at native resolution. He may as well have been talking about this.

PSVR2 owners on PC, read this part twice

There is a version of this where the most common eye-tracking headset in PC VR gets the feature and everybody wins, and it is not the version we got. Sony's own announcement of the PC adapter says that "HDR, headset feedback, eye tracking, adaptive triggers, and haptic feedback (other than rumble), are not available when playing on PC." Plug a PSVR2 into a PC and the eye tracking is off. Hello Games' new path needs it on. Keep the headset on a PS5, where Sony leaves the eye tracking working, and none of this applies to you.

While I was checking that, I found something we got wrong. Our May piece arguing PSVR2 was the best deal in VR summed up what the adapter strips as "No headset rumble. No eye tracking. No foveated rendering." The first two are right. The third is not. The same Sony post lists foveated rendering "(without eye tracking)" among the things that do work on PC, meaning the fixed kind, aimed at the middle of the lens whether you are looking there or not. It is a real distinction, it is the whole distinction in this story, and we should have had it right. There is a dated correction on that article now.

The other VR entries are housekeeping, and I mean that as a compliment

Four more lines in Cosmos mention VR, and none of them is a feature. The Corvettes section fixes an issue with recolouring Corvette-class ships in VR. The quality-of-life section increases the readability of the Exocraft UI in VR, and fixes a black screen that could happen in VR if you had GTAO switched off. Then there is this one:

Fixed an issue with the "Switch Base" controller binding on PSVR Move controllers.

Move controllers. The wands, on the original PSVR, which the Steam page still lists among the platforms this game plays across. Somebody at Hello Games sat down in 2026 and fixed a Switch Base binding for those players. That is not a strategy. It is somebody deciding a small number of people still count.

The spacewalk question nobody can answer yet

Cosmos also rebuilt going outside. Every pilot can now leave the ship, not only the ones flying a Corvette, through an eject button in the Quick Menu. And then:

Deepened and expanded spacewalking, adding true six degrees of freedom movement, including roll.

Roll.

Six degrees of freedom with roll is glorious on a monitor. In a headset it is the axis that decides everything, because rotating a player around an axis their body is not rotating around is where VR comfort usually goes to die. Add the new line saying explosions in space will now knock the player back, and there are two versions of this update. One is the best thing a headset has done in a while. The other is a bag of Dramamine. Which one it is cannot be read off a patch note, and the update went live hours ago, so treat anybody who already sounds certain accordingly.

The rest of it, briefly

Cosmos is update 7.0 and it went out on September 9. The announcement Sean Murray posted to Steam is blunt about the premise: "No Man's Sky is often referred to as 'a Space Game', it's a huge part of our game, but we've never really updated space since release." So space got the treatment. Derelict hulks you strip with a physics gravity gun until they start to melt down. Deep-space outposts to trade at. Free-floating modular bases you can plant anywhere, including on an asteroid. A run at the center of your own star system. And what Hello Games calls its most requested feature since launch, which is buying the space station outright and redecorating the inside of it. Murray's line on the release: "It's our 7.0 update and it's free to download now for all existing players across every platform."

Running alongside it is Expedition Twenty-Three, called Our Journey Continues, roughly six weeks long, and every milestone in it is one of the 40 major updates this game has had since it launched in 2016, with Murray recording commentary for each. A museum of the thing, inside the thing. You can walk it in a headset.

How to actually get into it

On PC the game is $23.99 on Steam as I write this, 60 percent off a $59.99 list. If you already own it, Cosmos is free and it is probably already downloading. The store page's own minimum requirements answer the how: under VR Support it says SteamVR, so you launch it through SteamVR like any other PC VR title, and what you get is the whole game rather than a separate VR mode parked on a menu. That store page also lists PlayStation VR 1 and 2 alongside PCVR among the platforms it plays across, so a PSVR2 on a PS5 gets Cosmos the same day everyone else does.

For the foveated rendering specifically you need a PC headset that tracks your eyes, connected as a PC headset rather than through the PSVR2 adapter. Beyond that one patch note line, I could not find a supported-hardware list anywhere Hello Games publishes: the Cosmos page names no headset, the Steam announcement names no headset, and the store page's requirements say only SteamVR. So if you are about to buy something on the strength of two sentences in a rendering section, wait a week and let people report back.

A month ago I wrote about the ten-year anniversary and said the only thing I wanted from whatever Cosmos turned out to be was for the pattern to hold: put the headset on the day it drops, get all of it. The pattern held. What I did not expect was that the update would quietly hand PC VR a rendering feature and quietly fix a button on a headset from the previous decade, in the same document, with the same amount of fanfare for each.

I bought this game the day it came out in 2016. Ten years on, the reason to keep paying attention is not the size of the universe. It is that a studio this size still writes the VR lines into the patch notes on a Wednesday and does not ask anybody to notice.