Overview:

Rendering for VR puts a premium on efficiency and reliability, as failure to render each eye's image in 8.3 milliseconds causes stuttering and risks nausea for the player. This talk goes into detail on the numerous low-level and high-level optimizations implemented to achieve this for 'PlayStation VR Worlds', a title that targeted state of the art graphical techniques and VR-leading visuals. Although the work targeted VR on PlayStation, most of the findings are relevant to non-VR games and indeed other platforms. As the graphics team was small (3 programmers), the team needed to minimize the time spent on crashes, glitches and performance issues. The talk will also describe some of the low-level tricks used to limit this wasted time, using run-time validation, CPU-side shader debugging and performance profiling.