Patent reveals AMD Navi may have variable rate shading (VRS) technology

A patent application from AMD reveals the firm is working on Variable Rate Shading (VRS) technology, a technique to speed up performance of future GPUs. Originally filed in August 2017, the patent is now publicly viewable on the website of the US Patent Office.

Hexus offers some coverage and notes that future GPUs like Navi may implement VRS to boost the performance of virtual reality, as well as other applications:

A big clue to the attraction of VRS lies within its name. Its applicability is most relevant to VR headset rendering where the centre of the displays can offer the sharpest detail with lower fidelity required towards the edges and corners of the HMD displays.

NVIDIA's Turing GPU architecture already feature a form of VRS. Research from NVIDIA suggests VRS can boost performance up to 50 percent, but a patch to Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus to implement VRS-alike NVIDIA Adaptive Shading yielded gains of just 5 percent.