As everyone gears up for the 2016 Game Developers Conference next month, organizers would like to quickly shine a light on one of the many great VR-focused programming talks taking place at the March conference.
Valve's Alex Vlachos is returning to GDC to deliver an expert session about "Advanced VR Rendering Performance." Reliably hitting 90 fps in VR is a significant challenge for contemporary developers. In his talk, Vlachos will present a method developed by Valve for adaptively scaling fidelity to consistently maintain VR framerate without using reprojection techniques, even on very low-end GPUs, while also having the ability to increase fidelity for high-end GPUs and multi-GPU installations.
The Aperture Robot Repair VR experience Valve brought to GDC last year required an NVIDIA 980 to maintain framerate, but this talk will use that same experience as an example of how Valve can now adaptively scale fidelity to maintain 90 fps on an NVIDIA 680 -- a 4-year-old GPU.
The end result is an engine that appears higher fidelity throughout the experience, a lower GPU min spec, increased art asset limits, and a system that allows developers to stop focusing on framerate and instead spend their time increasing the quality and performance of their renderer while consistently maintaining framerate.
It's a can't-miss talk for VR programming enthusiasts, and there are lots of other great Programming track talks at GDC 2016 -- including Piotr Tomsinksi's "Behind the Scenes of Cinematic Dialogues in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt," Activision's Benhamin Goyette talking about about "Fighting Latency on Call of Duty: Black Ops III" and Derek Neal and Bruce Hayles from Iron Galaxy discussing "Designing AI for Competitive Games."
GDC 2016 itself will take place March 14-18th at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. For more information on GDC 2016, visit the show's official website, or subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS.
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