Gaming. Design. Entertainment. News. Real estate. Art. Virtual reality can touch our lives in many ways. It’s an opportunity that goes well beyond gaming and professional visualization.

That’s why at the VRX 2015 conference in San Francisco today we announced that we’re partnering with Epic Games to put our GameWorks VR technology, including Multi-Resolution Shading and VR SLI, into its Unreal Engine 4. UE4 software powers hundreds of games on PCs and consoles. And it’s becoming a key tool to create immersive experiences of all kinds.

NVIDIA GameWorks VR will give those creating the next generation of VR experiences, like the developers gathered at VRX 2015, the tools they need to create VR experiences millions of people can enjoy.



Multi-Resolution Shading

Tools like NVIDIA Multi-Resolution Shading are just one of the technologies we built into GameWorks VR. Multi-res shading works with VR headsets to put more performance where users can see it.

It delivers higher resolution at the center of the image, where our eyes are focused, and lower resolution at the periphery, where they’re not. Because VR headsets “warp” or distort the periphery of an image, Multi-res Shading saves graphics workload without sacrificing image quality.

As demonstrated at VRX using the UE4 demo Reflection Subway, this GameWorks VR technology will help VR developers get up to 50% more performance out of their UE4-based VR games and applications.

Solving the VR Chicken-and-Egg

Developers will need all the performance they can get. VR is demanding. In fact, immersive VR experiences require 7x the performance of a typical 1080p PC gaming experience. So building an installed base of capable PCs is a key first step to making VR a reality.

We’re working hard to bring the power needed for VR to more PCs, with products like our GeForce GTX 970 graphics card and performance-enhancing technologies like multi-resolution shading. Through a combination of advances in our GPUs and software, we expect the installed base of GeForce VR Ready PCs to grow from 5 million today, to over 130 million by 2020.

This large installed base of high-performance, GeForce-based PCs offers the foundation upon which amazing, high-production value VR experiences can be built. We’re excited to be working with the entire VR ecosystem to make these experiences a reality — from companies making headsets, input and tracking devices, to capture and streaming technologies, to applications, to software engines that can drive a variety of experiences, to platforms and stores.

Climbing Mount Everest

I compare this journey to climbing Mount Everest. Our base camp: creating technologies like GameWorks VR that enables the ecosystem to develop amazing experiences. The next step: crossing the crevasse by building a large installed base of VR Ready PCs.

The summit: making VR a pervasive part of our lives.