Valve Working On Radeon Dynamic VRS For The Steam Deck To Increase Power Savings

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Valve Working On Radeon Dynamic VRS For The Steam Deck To Increase Power Savings

Yet another open-source Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver improvement being worked on by Valve's engineers is around better controlling variable rate shading "VRS" behavior with a focus on improving power savings for the Steam Deck...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=RADV-Dynamic-VRS

[schmidtbag]

So, if this is really only to reduce power consumption, I guess that means this has very little impact on performance? Because if it has a significant impact on performance too then I imagine this would be nice to toggle on-demand to allow for more detail.

[cytomax55]

It was in the second paragraph
"The shading at a lower resolution for less important areas of the screen can help with increasing performance as well as power-savings."

[cytomax55]

At first glance it seems like it just lowers the quality of more static objects which at that point you can decide do you want to decrease quality and to do that you can save power and keep the same performance or would you like to decrease quality keep the same power probably improve your performance

[Mar2ck]

Does this have to be implemented by each game or is this something the driver can force onto the game?

[xcom]

It's not working with DXVK, right?

[Ananace]

Does this have to be implemented by each game or is this something the driver can force onto the game?

Technically possible to force such a thing driver side, but you'll be limited to modifying the shader rate on the entire screen unless the game supports it.
And of course, games tend to behave rather... weirdly if they don't expect variable rate shading.

[Nille]

Its also nice for VR Games. Sonys new VR Headset 2 will have eyetracking and could also use this to increase the performance or image quality where you look.

[theriddick]

I've tried auto-VRS but never really saw any performance improvement but text and icons did loose a fair bit of quality. Has potential if custom profiles can be made or baked into games...

[gentoofu]

I've tried auto-VRS but never really saw any performance improvement but text and icons did loose a fair bit of quality. Has potential if custom profiles can be made or baked into games...

Which part of performance, frame rate or frame time? As far as I know, VRS helps with the latter and minimal on the former.

Here are performance results for Gears using VRS:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/gears-vrs-tier2/

Difference between Frametime and FPS:

https://digitalmasta.com/frametime-vs-fps/