GameWorks VR is a bagful of proprietary VR tricks
Nvidia announced a suite of virtual reality-specific hardware and software optimizations called VR Direct to coincide with the launch of its Maxwell-based GTX 980 and 970 GPUs last September. It is now giving headset makers and game/app developers a way to leverage all those features — as well as some new ones — in the form of the GameWorks VR software development kit (SDK).
Announced earlier today alongside the GTX 980 Ti GPU (read our review here), GameWorks VR is basically a bundle of APIs, software libraries, and features. Some target game/app developers, while others are meant for VR headset manufacturers.
While most of the features it enables were previously known to us, there is at least one trick that's both new and worth getting excited about. We're talking about multi-resolution shading (MRS), which basically involves rendering different portions of a VR image at different resolutions, thereby easing the load on the GPU and greatly improving performance. Nvidia distinguished engineer Tom Peterson told PCWorld that this can mean "between 50 and 100 percent less pixel work."
Here's a quick rundown of the features straight from the horse's mouth:
- NVIDIA Multi-Res Shading (MRS): An innovative new rendering technique for VR. With NVIDIA MRS, each part of an image is rendered at a resolution that better matches the pixel density of the final displayed VR image. This technology uses the multi-projection architecture of the GeForce GTX 980 Ti GPU to render multiple viewports in a single pass. The result: substantial performance improvements for VR games.
- VR SLI: Provides increased performance for VR apps. Multiple GPUs can be assigned a specific eye to dramatically accelerate stereo rendering. With the GPU affinity application programming interface, VR SLI allows scaling for PCs with two or more GPUs.
- Context Priority:Enables control over GPU scheduling to support advanced VR features such as asynchronous time warp. This cuts latency and quickly adjusts images as gamers move their heads, without the need to re-render a new frame.
- Direct Mode: Delivers plug-and-play compatibility for VR headsets. With Direct Mode, the NVIDIA graphics driver recognizes the headset as a VR display rather than a standard desktop monitor, providing a more seamless user experience.
- Front Buffer Rendering: Lets the GPU to render directly to the front buffer to reduce latency.
Interested developers can now request access to an alpha version of the SDK, which the company says is already in the hands of big names like Oculus, Valve, Epic Games, HTC, and CCP Games.
From maximumpc
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