NVIDIA GeForce VRSS Is A Welcome Advancement For Virtual Reality Enthusiasts

[Nexy]

Along with NVIDIA's CES driver release they delivered a new and exciting way to take advantage of Turing Variable Rate Shading capabilities and targeting VR enthusiasts. But Variable Rate Super Sampling (VRSS) is an excellent addition but how did we get here? It has been an interesting road to travel down watching how developers of games, head mount displays, and graphics card engineers have all been working towards a better VR experience.

One of the earlier techniques to be put into use with excellent results was Foveated Rendering which renders the center of the screen at the native resolution while reducing the rendering resolution around the edges so that a large portion of the rendering pipeline is opened up to ensure that visual details could stay high where you were already focused at the expense of the edges taking a hit. NVIDIA did manage to take this technology to a flat-screen experience with Shadow Warrior 2 a couple of years ago, allowing for a very easy and straightforward example of how it works.

For those following along the VR scene, you'll notice this is exactly what Oculus has done with the Quest. Sure it keeps the center crisp but really takes a dive when you start looking around, that's where Dynamic Foveated Rendering comes into play. That technology is coming and already being shown off by companies like Pimax, but we're still waiting for that to come to fruition.

Something to take note of with VR games at this point is that they're mostly designed around the 'entry-level' performance class for VR requirements, which lands in the GTX 970 and R9 290 level of performance. This basically means that having more power doesn't necessarily equate to a better visual experience, until now.

This is where Variable Rate Super Shading comes into play. This is something that NVIDIA has been working on themselves for the benefit of VR gamers. Before we get into the grit of it a quick and dirty explanation is to think of it as Reverse-Foveated Rendering where the edge of the screen is rendered at the native resolution and the center of the screen is given the supersampling treatment to crispen the image, and it works.

 

VRSS Game Support At Time Of Writing:

• Battlewake
• Boneworks
• Eternity WarriorsTM VR
• Hot Dogs, Horseshoes and Hand Grenades
• In Death
• Job Simulator
• Killing Floor: Incursion
• L.A. Noire: The VR Case Files
• Lone Echo
• Mercenary 2: Silicon Rising
• Pavlov VR
• Raw Data
• Rec Room
• Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality
• Robo Recall
• SairentoVR
• Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope
• Skeet: VR Target Shooting
• Space Pirate Trainer
• Special Force VR: Infinity War
• Spiderman: Far from Home
• Spiderman: Homecoming – Virtual Reality Experience
• Talos Principle VR
• The Soulkeeper VR