Variable Rate Shading: here is the "new" technology exploited by Xbox Series X

Variable Rate Shading: here is the

During this night, between one award ceremony and another ai The Game Awards 2019, we have seen several really interesting announcements. Between new IPs, concerts and game trailers never seen before, the event in general was really well done and ended with the award ceremony of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice as a game of the year. During these three hours or so that we spent together, the announcement that most of all really made the jaw drop was the reveal of the new console Microsoft products call Xbox TV Shows X. Not much has been said, on the contrary, we could say almost nothing if not a link to a technology that if before did not attract developers, now everything is different, the Variable Rate Shading (VRS). This technology has been around for some time on PCs ever since video cards came out Turing di NVIDIA which were the first to support them when they still had the name of Content Adaptive Shading.



So what is this "new" technology on the Microsoft console?

Basically the Variable Rate Shading allows developers to significantly increase the video performance without a net loss of image quality in certain points, a sort of optimization at the highest levels of all the resources in their possession to ensure a graphics quality definitely worthy of a new console generation. Some games, such as Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, already support Content Adaptive Shading on Turing GPUs. It must be said that this announcement was not entirely unpredictable as more than once there has been talk of the return of this technology on new consoles. Most likely, in fact, too PlayStation 5 -since the machine's architecture will be very similar to Xbox Series X- it will leverage this mechanism to produce better graphics where it's needed.



But why has it now been decided to take full advantage of this technology? Microsoft products, for its part, has understood that to create a truly top technical sector one can no longer rely exclusively on the power of video cards, but a right synergy of all the hardware and a more balanced optimization are the key to success, too. so as not to make the production cost and therefore the sales cost rise too much. If we then add support for Ray Tracing, another "new" technology that requires a lot of power, it is clear that something in terms of computation had to be changed compared to PS4 and Xbox One. In short, the technology has already existed for years, but now it's time to use it properly. Let's now take a closer look at how Variable Rate Shading works and what it consists of.

If we wanted to describe it in a really cheap way, we could say that the human eye, when it observes a precise point like a character in a video game, will focus more, and therefore highlight, the object it is observing by blurring. what is at the edge of the visual field. We could say that the human eye "optimizes" what it really has to observe, leaving out some details marginal in the more peripheral areas. The example you can see in the photos below is very clear:

Variable Rate Shading: here is the In this image we can see how the car placed in the center and the landscape background that we should travel quickly (being a racing game) are "squares" of a different color from the others. Following the legend it is easy to understand how the blue and green areas will be more optimized as the eye will focus more on them, leaving out some details in the yellow and red areas where it will be more complicated for us to perceive the details of the game in question. In slightly more technical terms we can say that the Variable Rate Shading allows you to adjust the amount of shading operations depending on the area of ​​the image, optimizing all the hardware available.



Thanks to this possibility of "graphic balance" it is therefore possible to push the graphic quality of a title where it is needed most, an option that will be in the hands of the developers to decide whether and how to exploit it by preferring a better image cleanliness or a higher frame rate. In this other image, similar to the first one, we can see how the final result of a game scene will be based on the shading rate that the developer chooses to use, thus allowing a better performance or a reduction of the game requirements. . But it will also be possible to do the exact opposite, thus exploiting a higher shading speed where it is needed to make the final visual quality better.


Variable Rate Shading: here is the Using another very clear and precise image like the one below, we can see how the game in question, Civilization VI, has a shading rate of less than 2 × 2 in the blue areas, and a shading rate greater than 1 × 1 in the red areas. A large number of shading means greater visual fidelity for the eyes but a significant impact on performance; conversely, with a lower shading rate, the visual fidelity is less but the performance will be higher.

Variable Rate Shading: here is the The main difference of this technology is precisely this. When a game is made, the shading settings are the same at all pixels although not all of them have the same importance but now, with Variable Rate Shading, this will no longer be necessary. Firaxis, the study he developed Civilization VIIn partnership with Microsoft products Regarding this demo image, he stated that implementing water and terrain with less shading than other on-screen objects such as terrain or buildings resulted in a 20% performance improvement on the RTX 2060 while gaming in 4K.


It therefore seems to have arrived a new dawn for this little or no technology used to date what else it can do if not good for the new next generation consoles. Not only is Microsoft embracing Variable Rate Shading, but a decent niche of developers seem keenly interested in starting to work on what has been said in this article. Software houses such as 343 Industries, Ubisoft, Playground Games, Activision and Massive Entertainment are just the first of what will be a long list of new VRS users. We look forward to Sony to find out if she too, with her PlayStation 5, will have implemented this technology inside the new machine.

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