In an ongoing effort to pitch developers on its toolset, Nvidia today published an interesting technical deep dive into its evolving “GameWorks VR” suite of virtual reality rendering tools written by a former Sucker Punch graphics programmer.
It’s a clear move to sell developers on the value of Nvidia’s VR rendering tech, but it’s also opportunity for VR-curious types to examine how a prominent GPU company is dealing with the challenges of rendering VR experiences comfortably.
Author Nathan Reed, who previously worked on the InFamous games, digs into some of the rendering techniques Nvidia is developing (for designers of both VR games and headsets) to overcome common VR experience hurdles like motion sickness.
“Missed frames are annoying even when playing on a regular screen, but in VR they’re incredibly distracting and even sickening,” writes Reed. “To help fight this problem, we enable the option to create a special high-priority D3D11 device in our driver…it preempts whatever is running on the GPU.”
Nvidia’s GameWorks VR tech is currently undergoing limited alpha testing in collaboration with folks at Valve, Epic and Oculus VR, and is expected to see a broader rollout to developers in the near future. For more details and to register your interest, head over to the GameWorks VR dev portal.