Unreal Engine is one of the most popular bases for videogame development, and has been the base on which many popular virtual reality (VR) titles have been built, such as Robo Recall. Nvidia have now released a new branch of VRWorks which integrates Unreal Engine support.

VRWorks – which was responsible for a new ‘Ultra’ quality mode in EVE: Valkyrie, announced earlier – has had its components and features adopted by various parts of the VR industry and acts as a suite of APIs, libraries and engines to enable high-end graphics performance.

The new branch enables Unreal developers can use new features such as Lens Matched Shading, Single Pass Stereo and Multi-res Shading. Each of the these new features offer advantages, such as Lens Matched Shading, which offers an improved version of multi-res shading by ensuring frame buffer and display pixel rates are matched for the best performance by taking advantage of Nvidia Pascal hardware. Another feature that takes advantage of Pascal hardware is Single Pass Stereo, which frees up geometry bandwidth, thus reducing resource demand.

A new VR SLI allows developers to take advantage of PC setups with multiple graphics cards to tackle scenes that are high in visual demand. This can offer twice the performance with a PC development rig equipped with a second graphics card, or over 2.8 times the performance with three cards.

The new VRWorks 4.16 Graphics branch of Unreal Engine 4 is available to anyone who has a Unreal Engine 4 Github subscription and is available to download now.

VRFocus will bring you further news on developments regarding Unreal Engine and VRWorks as it becomes available.