Category: CES 2020

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How To Enable NVIDIA VRSS On RTX Cards For Sharper VR Quality In Supported Games

NVIDIA’s Variable Rate Supersampling (VRSS) dynamically increases the resolution in the center of the lenses instead of wasting performance on the entire view.  Here’s how to enable it for supported games.

VRSS was announced and released at CES 2020. VRSS will only activate when the GPU is not already fully utilized. This means activating this feature shouldn’t prevent you from maintaining frame rate. This is important in VR because dropping frames can make you feel sick.

Supported Titles

This is a driver-level feature, so it doesn’t need integrated by developers. However, it will only work on a specific list of 24 games which have been tested by NVIDIA. As of writing, these are the supported titles:

  • Battlewake
  • Boneworks
  • Eternity Warriors 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
  • Sairento VR
  • 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

Update The Driver

To use VRSS, you’ll need to be on driver version 441.87 or later, as that was the version which added the feature. This is a stable release — so there is no need to download Beta drivers.

If you use the GeForce Experience tool, you can update your driver using it as usual.

Otherwise, you can download the latest driver from NVIDIA’s website.

Enable In NVIDIA Control Panel

To open the NVIDIA Control Panel, right click your desktop to find the shortcut. Once it opens, navigate to the Manage 3D settings tab.

Within 3D Settings, select the ‘Program Settings’ tab and scroll down to the very bottom setting.

Set it to ‘Adaptive’ in order to have the driver enable it when performance allows, and increase and decrease it based on what your card can currently handle.

That’s it! VRSS will now be enabled for the game you selected. Note that you’ll need to manually do this for each supported game you want to use VRSS. Hopefully NVIDIA adds an option to enable it for all VRSS supporting games in the future.

The post How To Enable NVIDIA VRSS On RTX Cards For Sharper VR Quality In Supported Games appeared first on UploadVR.

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Latest NVIDIA GPUs Get Foveated Supersampling Feature for Sharper VR Games

VR gamers running NVIDIA’s newest RTX graphics cards will be able to take advantage of a new ‘Variable Rate Supersampling’ (VRSS) feature designed to increase the sharpness of VR games without reducing performance. The feature uses a foveated rendering approach which focuses sharpness toward the center of the lens without wasting extra processing power toward the edges where the image will be blurred by the lens anyway.

Taking advantage of the Variable Rate Shading capability of the ‘Turing’ architecture in Nvidia’s RTX GPUs, the company today announced and released a new feature called Variable Rate Supersampling (VRSS). The feature allows games to be supersampled for added sharpness and clarity, but only toward the center of the lens. This allows GPU rendering power to be spent where it matters most.

For VR enthusiasts, supersampling is a well known technique for increasing clarity when there’s GPU horsepower to spare. Traditional supersampling techniques render the entire image at a higher resolution than the target display, which can make a surprising difference to the clarity of fine details in today’s VR headsets. But traditional supersampling is computationally expensive, and if you crank the knobs too high, you’ll start missing frames (which leads to an uncomfortable experience in a VR headset).

VRSS is designed to be a more efficient supersampling method that’s specific to VR. It takes advantage of the fact that the lenses of most VR headsets have a narrow ‘sweet spot’—a small region where lens clarity is the greatest—while the image gets blurrier toward the edges of the lenses. The human eye itself also only sees in high detail in a small sweet spot in the center (called the fovea). It therefore doesn’t make much sense to spend extra processing power sharpening the blurry parts of the image, which is exactly the premise of VRSS.

Image courtesy NVIDIA

VRSS uses Variable Rate Shading, a feature baked into RTX cards, to create a ‘foveated’ supersampling region at the center of the image while leaving the rest of the image alone. This means that GPU processing power can be more efficiently used to sharpen the center of the view. Nvidia says VRSS allows for more sharpness in the foveal region with less processing power.

NVIDIA test system specs: GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, Intel Core i7-6700K, 32GB, Windows 10, HTC Vive Pro | Image courtesy NVIDIA

Running on an Nvidia test system, the company claims that VRSS achieves 4x supersampling in Boneworks while maintaining a 120 FPS average, compared to roughly 75 FPS when using a traditional 4x supersample.

The feature is also designed to dynamically enable and scale according to available GPU power. If there’s extra processing power not being used, VRSS will supersample up to 8x, or disable itself entirely if necessary.

VRSS is available with the newest Nvidia drivers released today (you can download and install them through the GeForce Experience application). You’ll need to enable the feature in the Nvidia Control Panel; Nvidia recommends setting VRSS to ‘Adaptive’, and warns that using the ‘Always On’ feature may result in framerates dropping below the headset’s native rate.

Image courtesy NVIDIA

Unlikes previous foveated supersampling techniques from NVIDIA, like Lens Matched Shading, VRSS luckily doesn’t require specific integration with Nvidia GameWorks tools. However, there are some technical requirements: games must be based on DX11 or use forward renderers and support MSAA to work with VRSS.

Currently Nvidia is only enabling the feature for games which it has specifically tested, which is 26 at present:

  • Battlewake
  • Boneworks
  • Eternity Warriors 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

The post Latest NVIDIA GPUs Get Foveated Supersampling Feature for Sharper VR Games appeared first on Road to VR.

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CES 2020: NVIDIA Increases VR Sharpness For RTX Cards With Variable Rate Supersampling

NVIDIA just released a new driver feature which dynamically increases the resolution in the center of the lenses instead of wasting performance on the entire view. It currently supports over 20 VR games.

PC VR users often increase the rendering resolution of a game to beyond the resolution of the physical display panels. The result is a sharper image with less aliasing, and it makes text easier to read. This is called supersampling, and is available via the Oculus Debug Tool or SteamVR Settings.

Supersampling takes a significant performance hit as it demands the graphics card to render many more pixels. This means users have to use a relatively low supersampling value to maintain performance. Additionally, since many titles don’t support dynamic supersampling the user has to use a trial and error approach to find the right balance.

NVIDIA’s new feature, called “Variable Rate Supersampling” (VRSS), solves both of these problems. It dynamically applies up to 8x supersampling in the center of the view only, where you’re almost always looking in VR.

VRSS will only apply when there is enough GPU headroom left over to do so, and as such you’ll still be able to maintain refresh rate framerate in VR (avoiding sickness).

NVIDIA VRSS

This is a driver-level feature, so it doesn’t need integrated by developers. However, it will only work on a specific list of 24 games which have been tested by NVIDIA. As of writing, these are the supported titles:

  • 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

NVIDIA claims that it will continue to test more VR games and will add them to future driver releases.

The company’s benchmark chart is claiming a roughly 50FPS increase over using regular supersampling of the same quality.

This of course isn’t the first time we’ve seen this concept applied to VR. Facebook’s standalone VR headsets use a similar idea in reverse– reducing the quality of the edges of the view to save performance and thus allow intensive games to be ported.

Before VRSS back in 2018, NVIDIA itself gave developers the ability to supersample in the center of the view via the VRWorks SDK. However, only a handful of apps added support for this. The lack of developer adoption may be why this is now an adaptive driver level feature.

Based on our experience with Oculus standalone headsets and PC games using VRWorks, expect the differences in resolution between the center and edges to be noticeable, but not distracting.

Given that VRSS is applied automatically so that it won’t affect performance, it seems like a feature that all PC VR users with an RTX GPU should enable. You can do so in the NVIDIA Control Panel under 3D Settings. Set it to ‘Adaptive’ rather than ‘Always On’. Currently, it needs to be applied for each game.

The post CES 2020: NVIDIA Increases VR Sharpness For RTX Cards With Variable Rate Supersampling appeared first on UploadVR.

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Community Download: What Are Your Predictions For CES 2020?

Community Download is a weekly discussion-focused articles series published (usually) every Monday in which we pose a single, core question to you all, our readers, in the spirit of fostering discussion and debate. For today, we want to know what you think is going to be announced or unveiled at CES 2020?

The new year just started and it’s already time for the first big tech industry event. The 2020 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) kicks off in Las Vegas, NV this week and we’ll be on the ground at the show trying out demos, conducting interviews, visiting with companies, and streaming all of the latest footage and impressions from the cutting edge of our industry.

A lot happened at CES last year, such as the reveal of the HTC Vive Cosmos and HTC Vive Pro Eye, new VR controllers, the announcement of the GeForce RTX 2060, and other big news like Viveport Infinity. You can read all about the biggest headlines for the VR/AR industry from CES 2019 last year right here.

Facebook’s Oculus usually doesn’t have a big presence at the show since PAX East and GDC are both right around the corner, neither do companies like PlayStation (although Sony’s non-gaming divisions are usually in attendance) or Valve. We’re expecting a downplayed presence from HTC this time around as well.

So what do you think is in store for VR/AR at CES 2020? Will 5G make some big leaps? Is streaming content the future of VR like it wants to be for traditional gaming? What are your best and boldest predictions for CES 2020?

Let us know down in the comments below!

The post Community Download: What Are Your Predictions For CES 2020? appeared first on UploadVR.

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BeBop Sensors to Showcase Oculus Quest Compatible Forte Data Glove at CES 2020

BeBop Sensors has been demonstrating its latest Forte Data Glove iteration at technology show CES for the past several years and next week’s event is no different. What has changed is the addition of greater hardware support including Oculus Quest and glove features, with haptics now available.

BeBob Sensors - Forte Data Gloves

The company actually revealed the addition of Oculus Quest a couple of months back but CES 2020 will be used to officially announced the haptic feedback Forte Data Glove version. Alongside the Oculus Quest, BeBop Sensors has confirmed that Oculus Rift S, Windows Mixed Reality, HTC Vive Cosmos, HTC Vive Pro, HTC Focus Plus, and Varjo are all supported, as well as Oculus Link.

While all that headset support may sound consumer-friendly, like most gloves designed for virtual reality (VR) use the Forte Data Glove is still enterprise-focused. Namely towards training and maintenance applications. That doesn’t mean to say it can’t be used for gaming purposes, ideal for location-based entertainment (LBE) purposes.

Designed to be a one size fits all glove, the haptic feedback – which VRFocus first encountered back in 2018 – comes from 6 haptic actuators located on 4 fingertips, the thumb, and the palm. This helps users feel actions from hitting buttons, turning knobs and opening doors to simple things like texture feedback. Up to 16 unique haptic sound files can be resident on the glove with new files uploaded over Bluetooth or USB when available.

BeBob Sensors - Forte Data Gloves

Available to purchase now – although no price is given on the website, you need to submit a request form – the gloves also feature a 9-degree IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) providing low drift and a pre-blended accelerometer and gyro sensor.  BeBop Sensors claims the Forte Data Glove has a sub-6 millisecond response time and all-day battery life. To make sure the gloves are suitable for multiple users they are cleanable and breathable with waterproof sensors.

How well they work now since VRFocus’ last time using the Forte Data Glove remains to be seen, so we’ll be at CES 2020 to test the new version out. There will be some competition as Teslasuit will be demoing its latest device. VRFocus will continue its coverage of BeBop Sensors, reporting back with the latest updates.

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Teslasuit Unveils new VR Glove Ahead of CES 2020

There’s just over a week to go until the biggest technology event CES 2020 opens its doors once again, showcasing the very latest gadgets from around the world. Some companies have already begun announcing their latest products to be on display including virtual reality (VR) immersion specialist Teslasuit. It’ll take its new Teslasuit Glove for the first public debut.

TESLASUIT GLOVE

Working either in conjunction with the Teslasuit unit or completely separate, the enterprise-focused gloves have been designed to make VR even more immersive with a range of specialized features. These include haptics on each finger for texture and touch effects, and an exoskeleton providing force feedback; thus allowing grasped digital objects to feel like they’re really there.

Biometric feedback is another feature which companies may find useful, capturing real-time data of a user’s emotional state, heart rate and stress level depending on the application. For those that do want to use the gloves with the Teslasuit, connectivity is made easy thanks to built-in WiFi.

“We’ve created the Teslasuit Glove to expand XR-training capabilities. But the array of integrated features makes our product extremely versatile for a wide range of industries. Teslasuit Glove will hit the market in 2nd hаlf 2020; we have already been transforming the XR industry and now we are empowering the user to do so much more,” said Teslasuit in a statement.

TESLASUIT GLOVE

Details on how much the new Teslasuit Gloves will cost have yet to be revealed. As this is a business-oriented product the cost will likely be in keeping with devices like HoloLens 2 ($3000 USD), Magic Leap 1 ($2995) or Manus Prime Haptic (€5000 EUR).

With a design that’s very similar to Dexta Robotics’ Dexmo Enterprise Edition gloves which launched earlier this year, VRFocus will be at CES 2020 to test the Teslasuit Glove and see if it lives up to the PR claims.