OREANDA-NEWS. August 14, 2015.  Virtual Reality is now more than just Sci-Fi. VR is the next big thing in gaming and entertainment. And as part of our work to advance the state-of-the art in gaming, we’re releasing today the beta version of our GameWorks VR software development kit.

GameWorks VR gives game and headset developers better performance, lower latency, and plug-and-play compatibility for VR games and applications through a set of application programming interfaces, libraries, and features.

Since the alpha release of our GameWorks VR SDK in May, we’ve received a lot of great feedback from developers and have incorporated much of that feedback in this beta release. While the alpha release was limited to select developer partners, the beta release opens up key parts of the SDK to game developers across the globe.

Furthermore, GameWorks VR is now supported in our publicly released 350.60 Game Ready drivers. So, gamers with the latest drivers will now be able to get the benefits of GameWorks VR with supporting applications and headsets.

Our GameWorks VR Beta SDK comes in two flavors.

The SDK for game and application developers includes:

  • VR SLI: increases performance for virtual reality apps where multiple GPUs can be assigned a specific eye to dramatically accelerate stereo rendering. With the GPU affinity API, VR SLI allows scaling for systems with more than two GPUs.
  • Multi-Res Shading: is an innovative new rendering technique for VR whereby each part of an image is rendered at a resolution that better matches the pixel density of the warped image. Multi-Res Shading uses Maxwell’s multi-projection architecture to render multiple scaled viewports in a single pass, delivering substantial performance improvements.

Application developers can simply sign up for our GameWorks Registered Developer Program and download the GameWorks VR SDK for free.

The SDK for headset developers includes:

  • Context Priority: provides headset developers with control over GPU scheduling to support advanced virtual reality features such as asynchronous time warp, which cuts latency and quickly adjusts images as gamers move their heads, without the need to re-render a new frame.
  • Direct Mode: the NVIDIA driver treats VR headsets as head mounted displays accessible only to VR applications, rather than a normal Windows monitor that your desktop shows up on, providing better plug and play support and compatibility for the VR headset.
  • Front Buffer Rendering: enables the GPU to render directly to the front buffer to reduce latency.

If you’re a headset developer and you want access to the headset portion of our GameWorks VR technology, register through our GameWorks VR developer page.