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Steam Frame

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1039 points Philpax | 1 comments | 12 Nov 25 17:54 UTC | HN request time: 0.207s | source
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Night_Thastus ◴[12 Nov 25 18:38 UTC] No.45904028[source]▶
The whole "foveated streaming" sounds absolutely fascinating. If they can actually pull off doing it accurately in real time, that would be incredible. I can't even imagine the technical work behind the scenes to make it all work.

I'd really like to know what the experience is like of using it, both for games and something like video.

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pixelpoet ◴[12 Nov 25 18:59 UTC] No.45904434[source]▶
There's an awesome shader on shadertoy that illustrates just how extreme the fovea focus is: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4dsXzM

Linus the shrill/yappy poodle and his channel are less than worthless IMO.

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Night_Thastus ◴[12 Nov 25 19:32 UTC] No.45905089[source]▶
Imagine if we could hook this into game rendering as well. Have super high resolution models, textures, shadows, etc near where the player is looking, and use lower LoDs elsewhere.

It could really push the boundaries of detail and efficiency, if we could somehow do it real-time for something that complex. (Streaming video sounds a lot easier)

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1. pixelpoet ◴[12 Nov 25 22:49 UTC] No.45907994[source]▶
As a lover of ray/path tracing I'm obligated to point out: rasterisation gets its efficiency by amortising the cost of per-triangle setup over many pixels. This more or less forces you to do fixed-resolution rendering; it's very efficient at this, which is why even today with hardware RT, rasterisation remains the fastest and most power-efficient way to do visibility processing (under certain conditions). However, this efficiency starts to drop off as soon as you want to do things like stencil reflections, and especially shadow maps, to say nothing of global illumination.

While there are some recent'ish extensions to do variable-rate shading in rasterisation[0], this isn't variable-rate visibility determination (well, you can do stochastic rasterisation[1], but it's not implemented in hardware), and with ray tracing you can do as fine-grained distribution of rays as you like.

TL;DR for foveated rendering, ray tracing is the efficiency king, not rasterisation. But don't worry, ray tracing will eventually replace all rasterisation anyway :)

[0] https://developer.nvidia.com/vrworks/graphics/variableratesh...

[1] https://research.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/pubs/2010-06...