Unreal Engine and Unity To Get NVIDIA's New VR Rendering Tech (roadtovr.com)

An anonymous reader writes: NVIDIA has announced that Unreal Engine and Unity will see integrations of its new Simultaneous Multi-projection (SMP) rendering tech, which the company says can yield "a 3x VR graphics performance improvement over previous generation GPUs." NVIDIA recently introduced the technology as a unique feature of its latest series of GPUs built on the 'Pascal' architecture. According to the company, Simultaneous Multi-projection allows up to 16 views to be rendered from a single point with just one geometry pass, whereas older cards would need to add an additional pass for each additional view. This is especially beneficial for VR rendering which inherently must render two views for each frame (one for each eye). With Simultaneous Multi-projection built into Unreal Engine and Unity, game creators will have much easier access to its performance benefits. SMP is supported by all of NVIDIA's 10-series GPUs, including the recently announced GTX 1060.

Comments

Re:Has NVIDIA invented ray tracing?

[Guspaz]

How IS it ray tracing? Modern VR requires a lens-correction distortion be performed after rendering so that the image you see through the lens matches what was rendered. Lens matched shading breaks the image up into four quadrants and renders four projected views that are a closer match to where the detail will be in the final result.

Here you can see an example done traditionally:

http://i.imgur.com/FA56wzN.jpg

And here you can see the same scene rendered with lens matched shading:

http://i.imgur.com/CsDouw0.jpg

When a rendered scene normally goes through the distortion shader, most of the pixels around the edges are going to be lost as the distortion is strongest at the edges. This particular technique avoids that by starting out rendering less detail at the edges.

You could also take this to another level and use it for foveated rendering (where you render detail based on where the eye is looking), rather than the current technique of rendering multiple viewports at different resolutions and blending between them. Foveated rendering is a huge win for performance in that it results in a drastic reduction in pixels rendered, but the hardware (very accurate and very low latency eye tracking) and software required to do it isn't quite ready for consumer use.