AMD Announces VR Tech Asynchronous Reprojection and Forward Rendering

As one of the major proponents of VR, it was inevitable that AMD would cover this topic during their Capsaicin and Cream event. In addition to the usual touting of VR and why it is so awesome, the company also announced two new technologies they were working to bring forward. Together with various software partners and their own hardware, AMD announced the new VR technology Asynchronous Reprojection and Forward Rendering.

Asynchronous Reprojection is similar to an Oculus exclusive technology called Asynchronous Time-Wrap. Basically with VR, the performance demands can be so great that the system falls behind in generating a new frame. When this happens, Asynchronous Reprojection allows for a new frame to be generated in time using old frame data and new input information. The idea is that a less than perfect frame would still be better than no frame at all. I suppose it might be the VR equivalent to 1080i in some way. This will become available for HTC Vive users likely with a driver update.

Forward Rendering aims to address the problem of low-performance FPS from the opposite side. Instead of trying to catch up to user input all the time, Forward Rendering aims to predict user input and render things ahead of time. Forward rendering also allows MSAA to be better used and reducing the performance impact. With VR, anti-aliasing is ever more important and with Forward Rendering, MSAA is basically as free as FXAA is with deferred rendering. Epic is working  to integrate this into Unreal Engine of which AMD fully support so hopefully many games, not just VR-based ones, will be able to take advantage of this. I for one am tired of FXAA and wish MSAA was more widely adopted.