Unreal Engine 4 will incorporate NVIDIA GameWorks VR to help bring VR to masses

NVIDIA has announced that Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 4 will incorporate its GameWorks VR technology, a platform that helps developers create more immersive VR experiences.

UE4 already powers hundreds of PC and console games, making it a crucial part of the effort to make VR more accessible to a greater number of people. GameWorks VR brings performance-enhancing features like multi-resolution shading to the table, helping enable a wider range of GPUs to run VR applications.

In a nutshell, multi-res shading prevents the GPU rendering unnecessary pixels at the peripherals of images. The center of the image is rendered in high resolution, but the quality of the peripheral images is cut down to account for the warping performed at the edges by VR headsets. This thus reduces the demand on the GPU without having the user notice any drop in quality.

In a demonstration at VRX 2015, NVIDIA showed that this could help developers achieve up to 50% more performance from games and applications based on UE4.

The success of VR depends on a sort of chicken-and-egg situation. In order for it to really take off, developers need to get on board and create enough quality applications to attract users. But that isn’t going to happen if the user base is too small.

The tie-up with UE4 is thus part of NVIDIA’s push to establish a sufficient base of user PCs that can run VR applications, providing developers with the assurance that there will be an audience for their work. Features like multi-res shading to boost performance are just part of the story, and NVIDIA says that it expects the installed base of GeForce VR Ready PCs to balloon from just 5 million today to over 130 million in 2020.

Source: NVIDIA Blog

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