NVIDIA’s GameWorks VR Makes It To Unreal Engine 4, EVEREST VR Demo Gives Us A Preview Of What’s To Come

NVIDIA is sure on a rampage with flinging announcements out this month, and there’s no sign of it slowing down. Yesterday, the company announced that its GameWorks VR technology has made it into Unreal Engine 4, and while that might sound simple, there’s more to this than immediately meets the eye (see what I did there?)

For starters, one feature supported is VR SLI, which allows gamers who have more than one GPU to dedicate each one to an individual eye. The benefits here are obvious: performance will double. Better still, with the GPU affinity API, systems with greater than 2 GPUs can improve things further.

Another neat feature is Multi-Res Shading, one that can render each part of an image at a resolution that better matches the warped image people will see. NVIDIA notes that on Maxwell, multiple scaled viewports can be rendered in a single pass, thus improving performance even further.

For headset developers, features worth looking into include context priority, direct mode, and front buffer render.

While NVIDIA’s VR tech (and VR tech like it) is undoubtedly impressive, what ultimately will make it useful is good content. Fortunately, it didn’t take long for us to get teased with what’s coming. From Sólfar and RVX is EVEREST VR, a title that doesn’t leave much to the imagination. Check out the trailer:

NVIDIA GPUs are not just used here to render the experience, but they were also used to create it. With an incredible number of images on hand, a computer helped build Mount Everest in a 3D environment. As it appears, users will be able to scale the mountain from the comfort of their warm home, taking in the sheer beauty of it all once the peak is reached.

No release date for EVEREST VR has been announced, but even without seeing the trailer, it doesn’t require much thought to appreciate just how cool of an experience this could be when it gets here.