DirectX 12 to integrate Variable Rate Shading support

In a new blog post, Microsoft announces that DirectX 12 will soon integrate Variable Rate Shading (VRS) support. This technology was first introduced by NVIDIA's Turing architecture and not it will become a standardized part of DirectX 12.

Variable Rate Shading enables certain parts of the screen to be rendered at a lower (or higher) quality. Not everything requires the same shading rate so be using a lower shading rate for some parts you can achieve the same image quality at an increased framerate:

VRS allows developers to selectively reduce the shading rate in areas of the frame where it won’t affect visual quality, letting them gain extra performance in their games. This is really exciting, because extra perf means increased framerates and lower-spec’d hardware being able to run better games than ever before.

VRS also lets developers do the opposite: using an increased shading rate only in areas where it matters most, meaning even better visual quality in games.

On top of that, we designed VRS to be extremely straightforward for developers to integrate into their engines. Only a few days of dev work integrating VRS support can result in large increases in performance.

Microsoft tested VRS in Civilization VI and, depending on the hardware tier, they saw a performance boost of 14 to 20 percent.