It’s almost time for CES 2020, with tech companies from around the world heading to Las Vegas to show off their latest products. NVIDIA – known for its GeForce graphics cards – has several announcements to make this one with one important one for virtual reality (VR) enthusiasts. A new Game Ready Driver is now available adding a feature called Variable Rate Super Sampling (VRSS), designed to improve the visual quality of VR videogames.
VRSS works by using an existing NVIDIA technology, Variable Rate Shading (VRS), which is found on the company’s latest graphics cards using Turing architecture – products like the GeForce RTX 2070 or RTX 2080 for example. VRS is able to increase/decrease the image quality in different regions of the frame by decoupling shading rate from resolution.
Taking that another step further, VRSS uses fixed foveated supersampling to enhance the central area of a frame where a player is looking on videogames with a higher shading rate in comparison to the edges. Thus, players get better visuals which can aid immersive gameplay.
There are several criteria VR videogames need to meet to use VRSS such as being DX11 VR titles or applications that have forward renderers and support MSAA. Currently, 24 make the list:
- 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
And it’s not just VRSS that the new Game Ready Driver has packed with it. Other useful features for NVIDIA owners include:
- A new Max Frame Rate setting in the NVIDIA Control Panel to help save power, reduce system latency, and more.
- A new Freestyle splitscreen filter lets you showcase screenshots or videos in a side-by-side or even a blended fashion.
- An update to the Image Sharpening filter that lets users enable GPU scaling without image sharpening, and even supports custom resolutions.
- Adds support for an additional 8 G-SYNC Compatible displays. Adding these to the previously mentioned 2020 LG OLED TVs brings the total number of G-SYNC Compatible displays to 90.
NVIDIA regularly releases these Game Ready Drivers ahead of major titles coming to market, helping ensure players have a smooth and hopefully flawless experience.
Expect CES 2020 to be filled with VR news of various sorts this week with VRFocus there to bring you all the latest updates.