Today at the VRX conference in San Francisco, Epic Games, developers of Unreal Engine, announced that they’re partnering with NVIDIA to integrate their Gameworks VR featureset into UE4. VR SLI and Multi-res shading will be availabl in forthcoming updates.
NVIDIA’s Tony Tamasi, speaking at today’s VRX 2015 conference in San Francisco has announced a partnership with Epic Games to bring their own flavour of virtual reality enhanced GPU features to Unreal Engine 4.
Although not yet fully confirmed, it’s thought that the new features will make their way into release 4.11 of UE4 – coming ‘soon’ according to NVIDIA themselves. Gameworks VR, a suite of features designed to integrate tightly with GPU, drivers and VR hardware / software to deliver lower latency and higher frame rates, has been covered in depth by NVIDIA on this very website. But here is a breakdown of the key features of interest.
For game and application developers:
- VR SLI—provides increased performance for virtual reality apps where multiple GPUs can be assigned a specific eye to dramatically accelerate stereo rendering. With the GPU affinity API, VR SLI allows scaling for systems with >2 GPUs.
- Multi-Res Shading—an innovative new rendering technique for VR whereby each part of an image is rendered at a resolution that better matches the pixel density of the warped image. Multi-Res Shading uses Maxwell’s multi-projection architecture to render multiple scaled viewports in a single pass, delivering substantial performance improvements.
For headset developers:
- Context Priority—provides headset developers with control over GPU scheduling to support advanced virtual reality features such as asynchronous time warp, which cuts latency and quickly adjusts images as gamers move their heads, without the need to re-render a new frame.
- Direct Mode—the NVIDIA driver treats VR headsets as head mounted displays accessible only to VR applications, rather than a typical Windows monitor that your PC shows up on, providing better plug and play support and compatibility for VR headsets.
- Front Buffer Render—enables the GPU to render directly to the front buffer to reduce latency.
See Also: NVIDIA Takes the Lid Off ‘Gameworks VR’ – Technical Deep Dive and Community Q&A
As said, this is NVIDIA’s set of proprietary APIs for enhancing virtual reality rendering. It’s not clear if or when we’re likely to see AMD’s equivalent LiquidVR API suite implemented into the engine.