Unity developers can take advantage of performance improvements in their games and applications thanks to the rendering techniques introduced by Nvidia’s VRWorks.
VRWorks, of Nvidia, is now available in the form of a plugin for Unity, which makes it possible to take advantage of a series of techniques that allow obtaining greater performance in virtual reality applications developed with said engine. Specifically, we can take advantage of the VRWorks Graphics features that aim to offer a new level of visual quality, performance and response time. All this thanks to the following features:
Multi-Res Shading:
Rendering technique for virtual reality where each part of the image is rendered at the resolution that best matches the pixel density of the image corrected by the lens. It requires features of the Maxwell architecture (GTX 900 series) or later to render multiple views in a single step, providing substantial performance improvements.
Lens Matched Shading:
It uses the new simultaneous multiprojection of the Pascal architecture (GTX 1000 Series) to offer substantial improvements in the application of shaders. The feature improves Multi-Res Shading, by rendering to the closest surface of the corrected image from the lens. This prevents the rendering of many pixels that would otherwise be discarded before the image is sent to the HMD.
Single Pass Stereo:
It also requires Pascal architecture to draw the geometry only once, simultaneously projecting the view of the geometry for the left and right eye. This allows developers to practically double the complexity of the geometry of applications, increasing the detail and richness of the virtual world.
VR SLI:
It uses a graphics card for each eye, which dramatically speeds up the stereo rendering process. The GPU affinity API also allows scaling to systems with more than two GPUs.
VRWorks can be used with any PC virtual reality viewer, is compatible with DirectX 11, and requires Unity version 2017.1.b02 or higher. More information and download about the plugin here. Unreal Engine also has its version of the VRWorks plugin.