NVIDIA recently took the wraps off of Simultaneous Multi-projection, a new rendering technology built into the company’s latest series of ‘Pascal’ GPUs which is designed to enhance VR rendering performance. Nvidia says the tech is soon to come to Unreal Engine and Unity.
As Nvidia recently explained, ‘Simultaneous Multi-projection’ (hereafter ‘SMP’) allows Pascal-based GPUs to render multiple views from the same origin point with just one geometry pass; rendering multiple views this way previously would have required a pass for each projection, but with SMP up to 16 views can be rendered in a single pass (or up to 32 projections in the case of rendering from two viewpoints for VR).
SMP can be used specifically for VR to achieve what Nvidia calls ‘Lens Matched Shading’. The goal of LMS is to avoid rendering pixels which end up being discarded in the final view sent to the display in the VR headset after the distortion process.
And while Nvidia says SMP can yield “a 3x VR graphics performance improvement over previous generation GPUs”, the gains don’t matter if the tech isn’t built into VR games. So far we’ve only seen SMP built into a few tech demos, but it’s soon to get a potentially huge boost thanks to integration with Unreal Engine and Unity, the two biggest game engines and the primary tools used to create VR content.
Nvidia hasn’t said yet exactly when we’ll see SMP built into these two popular game engines, but the company notes that there’s already VR games being developed with the rendering tech, including Pool Nation VR, Everest VR, Obduction, Adrift, and Raw Data.
SMP is supported by all of Nvidia’s 10-series GPUs, including the newly announced GTX 1060.
