Tobii Spotlight Technology uses eye tracking to give you more FPS

Tobii presented its Spotlight Technology at last week's SIGGRAPH show. One of the concepts that's gaining more traction in the graphics world is that not everything needs to be rendered at the same level of detail. NVIDIA's Turing architecture as well as Microsoft introduced Variable Rate Shading, a technique that makes it possible to use less resources for certain areas of scenes.

Similarly, Tobii Spotlight Technology employs eye tracking for foveated rendering. The idea here is to track the movement of your eye to lower the resolution of parts of the image that you aren't focusing on. Only a small part of your eye's retina, the fovea, sees in high detail, everything else is more of a blur. This technology could be particularly suitable for VR, which requires a lot of graphical horsepower.

Tobii illustrated at SIGGRAPH that this technology can reduce GPU rendering load by 57 percent:

At SIGGRAPH Tobii showed off a PC system using its Spotlight technology as well as an Nvidia RTX 2070 graphics card (with DFR enabled via Nvidia VRS), an HTC Vive Pro Eye headset, playing the game ShowdownVR from Epic Games. Benchmarks using this setup delivered GPU rendering load reductions of 57 per cent, bringing the average shading rate using dynamic foveated rendering down to 16 per cent from around 24 per cent. Thus the GPU can work on other aspects of the game, and/or boost frame rates, or save power.

More details at Hexus.