OREANDA-NEWS. April 21, 2016. Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 4.11 is now available with Multi-Res Shading, one of the most advanced features of NVIDIA’s VRWorks SDK.

Multi-Res Shading can boost performance in VR games and applications by up to 50 percent.

Adding Multi-Res Shading to the latest version of UE4 — which powers hundreds of top games on PCs and consoles — is part of our effort to help developers build immersive experiences of all kinds.

Over the past year, we’ve been working with Epic to bring this VR technology to market, and Multi-Res Shading has been part of UE 4.10 since January.

The latest update — added shortly after the release of UE 4.11 — means  anyone developing VR games or professional applications with the latest version of UE4 can take advantage of this performance boost.

Multi-Res Shading works by putting more performance where users can see it. It delivers higher resolution to the center of the image, where you focus your eyes when you’re using VR, and lower resolution at the periphery, where they’re not.

Because VR headsets “warp” or distort the edges of an image, Multi-Res Shading saves graphics workload, without sacrificing image quality. That lets VR developers get more performance out of their UE4-based VR games and applications.

To see how it works for yourself, download the latest build here (requires Unreal Engine Github account to access).

Note: if you get a 404 error on the link above, create an Unreal Engine account and link it to your GitHub account, as described here: https://github.com/EpicGames/Signup.