Nvidia DesignWorks VR, GameWorks VR Beta Has Ended

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By Kevin Carbotte
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Nvidia announced that the beta period has ended for both the GameWorks VR and DesignWorks VR SDKs, and VR developers now have access to the 1.0 release of each. Nvidia claimed the included features can improve VR performance by as much as 50 percent.

Nvidia announced that the DesignWorks VR and GameWorks VR SDK beta period has ended. The company revealed that version 1.0 of both development kits are available for game developers making games for virtual reality and software developers creating tools for manufacturing and other professional needs.

The two SDKs comprise a set of APIs to help developers work with virtual reality environments and include features such as VR SLI, which will enable the ability to dedicate a GPU for each eye within a VR HMD. Multi-Res Shading is another feature that we've talked about a few times that will help increase performance. Nvidia recently stated that it achieved a 50 percent increase in performance using this technique in the Unreal Engine 4 tech demo Reflections Subway.

DesignWorks VR includes features such as GPU Affinity, which Nvidia said increases performance by managing how multiple GPUs tackle shared rendering and graphics workloads, and Synchronization, which is used to prevent image tearing and misalignment that can occur when creating desktops that span multiple GPUs or clusters.

To gain access to either of these SDKs, developers will have to register for the platform of their choice. GameWorks VR signups can be found here and DesignWorks VR signups are located here.

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Kevin Carbotte

 Kevin Carbotte is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware who primarily covers VR and AR hardware. He has been writing for us for more than four years. 

6 Comments Comment from the forums
  • kilzer15
    Fact: every game Nvidia touches runs like crap; even on their own hardware!
    Reply
  • monsta
    Fact: every game Nvidia touches runs like crap; even on their own hardware!
    Troll much?
    Reply
  • eriko
    Fact: every game Nvidia touches runs like crap; even on their own hardware!

    Well 'Sir', I have just changed my crossfire 7970Ms, for sli 880M GTXs. And whilst the 3Dmark scores are little different (5 to 25%) the overall experience is night and day.

    SLI wins hands down. So I don't see any truth to your comment. Oh, and I got PhysX now...

    Troll on..

    PS: I would still buy AMD again, just not in a MULTI-gpu setup.
    Reply
  • renz496
    16981559 said:
    Fact: every game Nvidia touches runs like crap; even on their own hardware!

    Well 'Sir', I have just changed my crossfire 7970Ms, for sli 880M GTXs. And whilst the 3Dmark scores are little different (5 to 25%) the overall experience is night and day.

    SLI wins hands down. So I don't see any truth to your comment. Oh, and I got PhysX now...

    Troll on..

    PS: I would still buy AMD again, just not in a MULTI-gpu setup.

    for multi gpu that's about right. that's why i've always hesitate for people to go for crossfire setup vs SLI. true they can can have better scaling sometime even better frame times. but stability and consistency wise SLI is better across majority of games.

    http://www.hardocp.com/article/2015/09/28/asus_strix_radeon_r9_fury_dc3_crossfire_at_4k_review/11#.Vk_QfeIu2Uk

    This is really the saddening part of the whole ordeal, how many issues we encountered with AMD CrossFire versus NVIDIA SLI. We had no issues at all with NVIDIA SLI in these six games, no stutter, everything worked and it was a smooth gaming experience. With AMD CrossFire we had issues in 3 out of 6 games played.

    We strongly feel that ASUS STRIX Radeon R9 Fury DC3 CrossFire has the potential to offer better performance than GeForce GTX 980 SLI. The issue lies in software support for AMD CrossFire versus NVIDIA SLI. In one of the games we tested AMD CrossFire doesn't even work at all, in two others there was extreme stuttering and odd framerate behavior. This is half of our game suite that exhibited an issue with AMD CrossFire.
    Reply
  • Quixit
    Well it's certainly true of Fallout 4 and Arkham Knight if not every GameWorks title. Both run unnecessarily poorly even on high-end Nvidia hardware. Bafflingly, incompetently poorly. Fallout 4 looks like it could run on an Xbox 360 and still runs terribly.
    Reply
  • renz496
    Batman AK is not even gameworks problem. Game like BF4 also have it's problem. Some even said that every Dice game is never leave beta state. But you don't see people complaining about it because it is not Gameworks title.
    Reply