VRX is taking place this week in San Francisco, and Nvidia took the opportunity to make an exciting announcement about Gameworks VR and its forthcoming integration into Epic Games' Unreal Engine in the coming months.
When that happens, VR developers using Unreal Engine will have the ability to use Multi-Res Shading as well as VR SLI performance enhancements. Nvidia believes the addition of the integration will rapidly increase adoption of Gameworks VR features.
Some of the features being integrated into the engine are VR SLI, which enables each GPU to handle rendering for a specific eye. Nvidia has also considered systems with more than two GPUs installed by including a GPU Affinity feature that will let VR games scale over the extra processors.
Multi-Res Shading is also part of the Gameworks VR SDK. This is a technique that renders the image in different resolutions depending on the focus. VR lenses warp the image, leaving only the center in focus. Multi-Res Shading takes advantage of this and renders the least in focus areas with less clarity, which Nvidia said improves performance substantially where it counts.
Nvidia said that the company has seen as much as a 50 percent performance improvement in the UE4 Reflections Subway demo when using Multi-Res Shading, but the work on it continues. The company said that integration into the engine is still a couple months away, so final performance improvements could be better than internal tests are showing today.
The version of the Unreal Engine that first sees Gameworks VR integration has yet to be finalized, but the company expects version 4.11 to be the first public release.
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