One of the main tasks of game development and programming in general is optimization without significant loss of quality. Therefore, at one time a bunch of codecs for audio and video appeared that provided compression while maintaining acceptable performance. And now Microsoft has introduced its solution of a similar nature for games.
At the Game Developers Conference 2019, a Redmond-based corporation announced the implementation of Variable Rate Shading technology, which is part of the DirectX 12 API. This technology is a functional analogue of NVIDIA Adaptive Shading and is designed to save graphics card resources. This allows you to reduce the load when calculating peripheral objects and zones. At the same time, the technology allows you to increase detail where necessary.
As a result, this technology improves in-game performance without a noticeable loss in image quality. During the presentation, the company showed how the technology works in Civilization VI. As noted, the frame rate on the left side of the image was 14% higher than on the right side with the same quality.
A number of companies, including Turn 10 Studios, Ubisoft, Massive Entertainment, 343 Industries, Stardock, IO Interactive, Activision and Epic Games, have already announced that they will implement Variable Rate Shading in their projects. At the same time, Redmond said that the technology is supported by NVIDIA cards on the Turing architecture and the future Intel Gen11 family. It is also possible that future discrete Intel cards will also support VRS, although this has not been explicitly said yet. And earlier there were rumors about the support of technology in the Navi generation GPU and next-gen gaming consoles.
As a result, the technology will allow creating better graphics quality games with relatively low requirements for a video card.
Source: 3dnews.ru