Nvidia's New 900 Series Includes VR Direct

[Tbone]

http://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2014/09/18/maxwell-virtual-reality/

Nvidia has teamed up with Oculus to bring many VR improvements to its new 900 series. It is unclear as to if some of these features will make it onto older cards via software updates, but for now it's just nice to know that GPU manufacturers are working with Oculus. Here's a quick list of new features:

• Baseline latency: Our engineers worked to cut all aspects of the connection between the game and the GPU, significantly improving latency.
• MFAA: Using a new technology called multi-frame sampled anti-aliasing, or MFAA, Maxwell can combine many AA sample positions, producing what appears to be a higher-quality image. And it does this without the performance hit caused by other anti-aliasing technologies.
• Asynchronous Warp: This starts with the last scene rendered, and lets the GPU update it based on head position information. By warping the image later in the rendering pipeline, Maxwell cuts discontinuities between head movement and action on screen. And by doing it asynchronously, it avoids stalling the GPU, robbing it of performance.
• SLI: We’re also tuning the way our GPUs work together when they’re paired to drive virtual reality experiences. In the past, our GPUs would alternate rendering frames when joined in SLI mode. For VR, we’re changing the way our GPUs work in SLI, with each GPU rendering one display.
• DSR: With the displays in a VR headset resting close to the user’s eyes, higher resolution can improve the VR experience. Dynamic Super Resolution (DSR) – which we’re introducing with Maxwell – helps us take the resolution from 1 megapixel per eye to 4 megapixels per eye.
• GeForce Experience: Rather than asking users to tweak all these settings when using VR, we’re implementing them to run automatically with our GeForce Experience software. Optimized content: Few applications support VR headsets. So we’re bringing VR support to games that already work with NVIDIA 3D Vision.

[Maglorius]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kh8bhQIez3E#t=255