VRWorks from NVIDIA brings Variable Rate Shading to RTX Cards

What does that mean dir VR?

It will give an insane performance boost even without eye tracking because the internal render resolution before lense distortion correction can use a static description of what will actually later be visbile inside the HMD and cull everything else.

There is much much more (like super sampling only parts or just GUI Elements) but this alone will bring much performance in the near future

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I got super excited about reading about the VR stuff for Pascal. I assumed it all worked because my 1080 worked fine for the Rift and then my 1080 Ti worked even better. I was quite surprised to learn that almost no games seem to support even the Pascal capabilities. I really hope developers support VRworks, but I’m not optimistic.

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VRS should be easier to integrate but yes i feel your pain.

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Valve already recommends using a mask to restrict shading to visible parts of the screen, even without VRWorks, and have done so since Vive devkit days. (EDIT: Don’t ask me how many developers actually do it. :P)

The other things, though, would help tremendously. Lens matching the shading (about 3/4 down the page) alone could do much to mitigate the conseqences of high FOV on flat panels, already on 100° headsets, but would take a weight off the GPU’s chest with 170.

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Unfortunately adoption of VRWorks of nVidia and LiquidVR of AMD has been really bad to almost non existent.

What the new Pimax headsets show is that we need much more GPU performance that we can buy or afford today. So supporting dual GPUs of the last GPU gen is really one of the main demands every Pimax backer should ask for.

I wonder if there is a need for some petition or sth similar to get VR developers moving the right way. The OpenXR API is kind of a unknown factor in this, could be that everybody holds it’s breath until v1.0 is released later this year.

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VRS is a little different in that you can bake it into the SteamVR side. It could theoretically work for any title and allow users to gain up to about 40% more performance.

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Wirth the integration of VRworks into unity, unreal anderen all other engines (which of nvidia they are in the Workline) the app integration could be as simple as a couple of lines of code. Some of the featurs may even be available on driver level to have it plug & play

There were UE4 builds with some of the VRWorks features for Pascal, too. Those soon fell by the wayside. I’ll keep the lid on the excitement casserole, for now…

I fail to see how SteamVR integration could make games automagically render with VRS – Some DirectX injector would need to intercept their shaders, and somehow decompile and auto-refactor them, or replace them with pre-written targetted alternatives (think ENB, and such).

What REALLY needs to happen is that nVidia and AMD need to somehow automatically link multiple video cards in the driver, without the need for a game developer to anything “special”. That’s the only way we’d ever get consistent support.

Not possible since a NUMA VRAM layout across different cards has such a major latency penalty it’s not possible to go without awareness of the dependency in render pipelines. The way APIs work today there is no standard to always describe what goes to which VR view. That makes driver based dual GPUs for dual views also impossible. We gotta wait for OpenXR development the next 2-3years and see what’s coming for multi view support there…
Maybe sth can come up in NUMA on a single interposer die, on a single PCB might become doable with PCIe4/5 on low FPS, but that’s future cards only.

Didn’t Ashes of the Singularity do this? IIRC you can use multiple GPUs of differing types and it uses the PCIx bus to transfer data…

Yes, that’s not the issue. The reason all games don’t support dual graphics cards is that developers have to write (and test) code to handle it. Testing is a big deal, since they would need multiple setups with a variety of cards.

If the support was “invisible” and handled by the driver, ALL games would support dual GPUs.

I know this is (or was) possible, some years ago, AMD released 1 card with 2 GPUs which automatically ran in dual GPU mode, no extra code required.

This sounds much like SMP which as I recall only iracing implemented, it had huge performance gains for VR but much like all this fancy SDK and tech on these graphics cards, it will barely be implemented in anything. All the development difficulty and market adoption concerns aside, I think the real reason is if we get a huge bump in performance via feature that is simply turned on, some might hold off on buying the latest gpu for an extra generation and thus this all boils down to more money in the end.