Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Give Your GPU a Break! – Variable Rate Shading Explained”.
Lighting effects and video games haven’t always been a thing in the old days. You’D move Mario around on the screen and he’d be exactly the same, color and brightness no matter what, but these days we want our games to be as photo realistic as possible. So colors, brightness, shadows and lighting effects have to be changed on the fly and to do this, your graphics card uses a special program called a pixel shader. You see all those shaders can perform many different functions. Their main job is to make sure that each and every pixel is lit properly, not just by taking into account how much light a surface should be reflecting, but also its texture, its transparency and any other nearby objects.
That could be casting shadows and since they’re responsible for so many graphical functions, shaders typically take a good bit of processing power in order to run, but as resolutions have risen, applying a different shading effect to every single pixel has become more and more computationally expensive, and This is especially true in VR gaming, since VR headsets need to have high resolutions and frame rates in order to give players an immersive experience that won’t make them feel sick. This is where a new and exciting technique called variable rate. Shading could really help lighten the load leading to smoother VR experiences without requiring such expensive hardware. Here’S how it works when you wear a VR headset, some of the pixels have to be lens corrected since you’re viewing the image through a curved lens. Instead of looking directly at a flat screen like you would on a traditional desktop, this means that different areas of the image don’t need to be as detailed, because they’re going to always be either in your peripheral vision or even discard it entirely.
As part of the lens correction process, so what variable rate shading does is, instead of treating every individual pixel with equal weight the traditional way it varies, how much processing power is used for each part of the image, so developers can use VRS to say? Okay, this part of the image right in front your eyeball. Let’S shade that with as much detail as possible, whereas these other parts – let’s do those in a more quick and dirty fashion. So to do this developers can choose just one shading output for a block of up to 16 pixels by evaluating a single pixel near the middle of the selected area and applying the result to the entire chunk of the image.
Saving a significant amount of processing power and if a pixel was just gon na get discarded completely by the time it reaches the headset, it actually doesn’t have to be rendered at all, and more improvements are on the way, as eye tracking finds its way into VR. Headsets eye tracking can be integrated with variable rate shading technology, so, instead of simply dedicating the most processing power to the front and center of the image at all times, your computer or your game console can know exactly where you’re looking in a given moment and dedicate The most processing power there leaving your peripheral vision, a little blurry er as it would be anyway, but even if you’re, not using a VR headset. That knows where you’re looking this technique can still be useful for games where there are lots of uniform or redundant textures. Like large-scale simulation games, where a lot of your screens real estate is taken up by giant patches of land, for example, now of course, this feature only started gaining support this year, so it might be a little while before we see tons of game developers implemented. But if you’re, the type of person who gets nauseated when the frame rate on your oculus rift drops just a little bit, I’m sure you’re feeling like it can’t come soon enough. Just like this segue to our sponsor brilliant brilliant is the site that helps you become better at math and science.
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