Nvidia and AMD both support MultiView (render both eyes at the same time, like instances stereo rendering for GPU) and MultiRes (render the edges with lower res than the center) rendering for Rift and Vive.
Nvidia offers their VRWorks branch of UE4, but that’s stuck at 4.13 currently.
Now it’s nice that Nvidia offers that branch, but honestly it’s quite useless when its stuck at 4.13 while I prefer to use the master branch for VR to get optimizations and new features as fast as possible. No vendor, neither Nvidia nor AMD will be able to maintain their own master branch of UE4 with those features. AMD currently does not have a UE4 branch for it, but they also would not be able to fix the problem with keeping it up to date any better than Nvidia.
But just imagine for a second that AMD would offer a UE4 branch too, then people would somehow have to merge Nvidias solution with AMDs to get a UE4 version that supports MultiView and MultiRes both on Nvidia and AMD - that wouldn’t work at all since they would both probably modify the same files and functions.
So what’s really needed here is Epic officially supporting this as a feature in the engine. It’s good that Epic does not integrate features that only work on either Nvidia or AMD, but since both of them now support it on all VR capable GPUs (Nvidia GTX 960 and above, AMD R9 290 and above)* it’s definitely time for Epic to make it an official engine feature where it’s no longer needed to use some outdated custom branch of UE4.
Especially with features like these that improve performance by up to 50%. That’s a bigger improvement than the forward renderer gives, and every single UE4 VR game would benefit from this, while something like the forward renderer currently only makes sense to use for specific projects and also doesn’t give so much performance gains.
To be fair, AMD only released the driver with support for it today, so there wasn’t exactly that much time to think about implementing a general solution for this into UE4. But now that both AMD and Nvidia support it, is there anything that should prevent this from being a very high priority thing to implement into UE4?
Some slides:
http://puu.sh/sJ6Gb/7dd6891d58.png
- Nvidia calls MultiView “SINGLE PASS STEREO” it seems. I can’t find much about that, so I’m not 100% sure if it’s supported on older Nvidia cards. But since even ARM GPUs support MultiView rendering, I would guess that Nvidia also made it available for older GPUs.