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Screenshot of Half-Life: Alyx, using the Source 2 Engine.

Screenshot of de_canals in Counter-Strike 2.

Source 2 is a 3D video game engine currently in development by Valve as a successor to Source. It is used in Dota 2, SteamVR Home, Half-Life: Alyx, S&box, Counter-Strike 2, and more.

Source 2 was first made public with the Dota 2 Workshop Tools Alpha in August 6th 2014 and formally announced by Valve in March of 2015 at the Game Developers Conference. It was then implemented into Dota 2 on June 17th 2015. Valve has announced that Source 2 will be released to the public for free, and it will only take money should it be used for commercial products.

The engine is capable of rendering highly complex and well detailed scenes with minimal framerate drops, thanks to its new 64-bit support alongside Vulkan, allowing for better multi-core rendering and more efficient 3D rendering.

Features

• Integrated asset management via the Asset System.
• New engine-integrated authoring tools, rebuilt from the ground up.
• Completely rebuilt Hammer level editor, featuring modern polygon mesh editing tools.
• Support for both forward and deferred rendering pipelines.
• Lower latency and more responsive input.
• Improved audio and voice processing.
• New in-house physics engine, Rubikon. Includes support for Cloth Simulation.
• Physically based rendering support.
• Support for the Steam Audio sound system.
• WebM video, replacing the previous Bink Video format.
• Enhanced Panorama GUI, designed to be more user friendly.
• Native DirectX 11® and Vulkan® support, with support for Shader Model 5.0 and later.
• 64-bit supported
  • Previously, Source 2 also support 32-bit, which has been dropped since Dota 2 (except SteamVR Home).

Limitations

Warning:Support for 32-bit, OpenGL, DirectX 9 (includes Direct3D 9), XAudio, and macOS versions below 10.14 were removed in 2021 with the Dota 2 update. SteamVR Home is not affected. Newer games such as Half-Life: Alyx and Counter-Strike 2 doesn't support them.

Warning:Some games like Counter-Strike 2 no longer support Squirrel (initially as of the Limited Test Release), making things non-trivial to port and with no chance of a proper transition period when both implementations are functional.

Products using Source 2

Valve

Products made by Valve.

Released

Year	Title	Developer(s)	Publisher(s)	Platforms	Notes
2015	Dota 2	Valve	Valve	PC	Originally using Source, ported to Source 2 in 2015.
2016	SteamVR Performance Test	Valve	Valve	PC (VR)	Non-interactive version of the Robot Repair demo
2016	Robot Repair – Included in The Lab	Valve	Valve	PC (VR)
2016	Destinations	Valve	Valve	PC (VR)	Replaced by SteamVR Home.
2017	SteamVR Home	Valve	Valve	PC (VR)
2018	Artifact	Valve	Valve	PC	The Dota Card Game.
2019	Dota Underlords	Valve	Valve	PC
2020	Half-Life: Alyx	Valve	Valve	PC (VR)
2022	Aperture Desk Job	Valve	Valve	PC (Steam Deck)
2023	Counter-Strike 2	Valve	Valve	PC	Originally planned to be released in Summer 2023, but it was delayed and later released in September 27, 2023

Unreleased

This section are for unreleased Valve games that are not publicly released or is in Beta/Early Access.

• There are currently no unreleased first-party Source 2 game.

Third-Party

Products made by third-party companies and mod teams.

Released

• None yet.

Unreleased

This section are for unreleased 3rd party games that are not publicly released or is in Beta/Early Access.

Year	Title	Developer(s)	Publisher(s)	Platforms	Notes
TBA	S&box	Facepunch Studios	Facepunch Studios	PC

Documentation

• Source 2 Documentation Index
• Source 2 General Discoveries

See Also

• Source 2 on Wikipedia