Hey everyone, I hope you are doing great this weekend! The last week I’ve been spending some more time with the FFR modes with Pimax. If you are interested, you are welcome to check out my analysis I just uploaded. It may not be super in-deep about the technology itself, but the benchmarks should give you an idea.
I know its still early beta phase, but this is basically a first look. Let me know if you have different results, or if I have missed something here 
Cheers
Martin
Good video! Personally, I found even the lowest FFR setting to be too distracting (due to aliasing and shimmering), so I’ve turned it off.
About Project Cars, you can enable FFR while following this method :
https://community.openmr.ai/t/how-to-play-project-cars2-on-pimax-8k-5k-without-parallel-projections-and-steamvr/18644/49
For what I have understood, it launches the game from Pitools without SteamVR (and without parallel reprojection), and while increasing the performance, it also enables the FFR !
I think the best setting is balanced. It’s hard to see the difference, and it clearly gives a framerate advantage.
Otherwise, it’s not compatible with MSAA
It works only if you have RTX in your video card.
So it’s useless for the most people.
the aliasing is dissapointing, i imagined it to be blurred to be natural. Maybe pimax can add a softening filter for the peripheral?
same thing here if it was a progressive radial Gaussian blur effect I would probably be ok but the flickering and shimmering effectively is too distracting for me also.
Same here. In Elite Dangerous on the lowest FFR setting gave a nice performance boost but too distracting.
I will not use it either for the same reasons… Unfortunatly… 
Does anyone (@Sweviver) know how the FFR resolution works? Is it a percentage of the overall resolution(should be), or is it a specific resolution(would look distracting next to a SS center)? I don’t have an RTX card and this would have been a deciding factor to upgrade, however my most played game(PC2) isn’t supported.
I wonder if the percentage could be adjusted, or even applied more aggressively towards the outside(10-50% drop in resolution), or if this is handled in the driver(Nvidia).
Don’t upgrade for this now period it’s interesting if you have a RTX card and try to find a games worth using with but this shouldn’t be a deciding factor, for VR; an USB-C connector, more memory and better performance would be…
If one day Pimax Headset get eye-tracking things would be different but now with the current FFR implementation in last beta driver it’s simply not worth the trouble upgrade wise, but it look promising like Martin said
It sounded like FFR will be available for GTX cards in the future too.
My guess is that it is tied to the recent ray tracing driver update by NVidia.
I don’t think FFR requires ray tracing but NVidia making the RTX API available for GTX.
I currently have a 1080 and would like to increase the resolution/framerate(PC2), but after seeing Martin’s results(@60fps) I will hold off. Hopefully an update will allow this to run without PP on.
I saw that and posted here asking if that would allow FFR on 10XX cards(no news).
related thread on reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/9hf1vs/with_rtx_turing_architecture_foveated_rendering/
From NVIDIA white paper
Introduction to the NVIDIA Turing ArchitectureNVIDIA Turing GPU ArchitectureWP-09183-001_v01 |
5 Variable Rate Shading (VRS) VRS allows developers to control shading rate dynamically, shading as little as once per sixteen pixels or as often as eight times per pixel. The application specifies shading rate using a combination of a shading-rate surface and a per-primitive (triangle) value. VRS is a very powerful tool that allows developers to shade more efficiently, reducing work in regions of the screen where full resolution shading would not give any visible image quality benefit, and therefore improving frame rate. Several classes of VRS-based algorithms have already been identified, which can vary shading work based on content level of detail (Content Adaptive Shading), rate of content motion (Motion Adaptive Shading), and for VR applications, lens resolution and eye position (Foveated Rendering)
I’m also playing ED. Unfortunately, that game has really bad aliasing issues (lots of parallel pipes, gratings, etc.) which are quite visible (even with Super Sampling). FFR makes that aliasing crawl even more pronounced.
I think FFR would work better if it were used as way to improve quality (instead of degrading visuals in the periphery). Of course, this would require more powerful GPUs. Imagine FFR “enhancement”, where the peripheries are drawn with the same visual quality as when FFR is OFF. Then, the intermediate area is drawn at an additional 2x SS and the inner area is drawn at 4x SS.
Really much more broader possibilities:
Unfortunately these features rarely implemented(or take years), SPS was mentioned in 2016, and just added to IRacing recently.
As far as I know, NVidia’s VRS is a discrete factor of two divider/multiplier kind of thing, on the normal fixed overall resolution of the whole picture we ask the game to render: For every block of 16 by 16 pixels, you can set shading to occur once for every 1, 2, or 4 pixels, separately for the x and y axis (this allows you to tailor per-frame to things like anisotropy (e.g. use squat wide pixels on a floor, that may be squished vertically from your point of view anyway, unless you look down all the time), or whether features are otherwise predominantly vertical or horizontal in the patch of bitmap).
They really need to do three things to make FFR viable:
Eye tracking will be important as well, especially yo make point 3 invalid
Works in Skyrim and the forest. Wish pimax got this working on 1080ti’s