( ExtremeTech has a superb overview of all the GameWorks concerns if you’re interested.) That’s been the cause of much recent hand-wringing, most recently when The Witcher 3 launched with Nvidia’s HairWorks technology, allegedly- but not really-crippling performance on AMD hardware. GameWorks is Nvidia-created middleware that adds features and technologies with performance optimized for GeForce graphics cards-but, naturally, not for AMD Radeon cards. Multi-resolution shading isn’t only restricted to the most recent GeForce graphics cards, but it’s also an Nvidia proprietary technology being offered under the company’s new GameWorks VR program, which brings Nvidia’s former VR Direct initiatives (like VR SLI) under the GameWorks banner. There’s a potential flaw in this gem, however. “So if you’re a game developer, this means that you can have higher quality games, or that you can have your games run on more GPUs,” says Peterson.Īnd just like that, the Oculus Rift’s GTX 970 requirement didn’t feel quite as paltry as it did when the headset’s specs were released. That’s big news for VR developers, and for gamers who want to get into the virtual reality experience without spending the equivalent of a college education on a graphics card. When staring at the center of the display, which was rendered at full fidelity, the compressed resolution at the edges could only very barely be seen, no doubt thanks to the way the human eye views images in our peripheral vision with far less detail than what we’re directly looking at. The effect was minimal, however, and that’s when I was specifically looking for it on the edges. Only then was the effect noticeable, as a faint shimmering around the very edges of the image. In order to truly make the reduced rendering visible, Peterson had to crank the compression up to 50 percent, or half the workload of the same image rendered at full resolution across the board. “So what we actually have to do is take the original image, then warp it, to account for the fact that it’s going to be re-distorted by those lenses, so that by the end of the day-when you see it-the image is straight again.” “GPUs render straight, not distorted,” says Peterson. Making images appear correctly with all that distortion requires a lot of graphical trickery. You can see the end result on your primary computer screen if you ever use a PC connected to an Oculus Rift. The Oculus Rift (and other VR headsets) scrunch the edges of rendered environments together into a roughly oval shape to make them appear correctly when viewed through the lenses. “So these lenses are actually distorting. “If those lenses weren’t there, you’d be basically trying to focus on a screen right in front of your face, which causes a lot of fatigue and strain,” says Tom Peterson, a distinguished engineer at Nvidia. But VR headsets use a pair of over-the-eye lenses to push the focal point of scenes out into the distance. Normally, graphics cards render full-screen images as a straight-ahead, rectangular scene, applying the same resolution across the entire image-think of how PC games appear when you’re playing them.
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