Introducing The GeForce GTX 1080: Gaming Perfected

These gains in performance and power efficiency are enabled by the marvels of the Pascal architecture. The first of these marvels is the introduction of cutting-edge 16nm FinFET chip construction. This new, smaller chip design uses fewer Watts of power and emits less heat, enabling us to crank up the core clock speed of the GPU, which is key for increasing a graphics card's performance.

For decades PC gamers enthusiastically enjoyed their games on flat 4:3, 16:9 and 16:10 monitors. Thankfully technology has advanced, and we can now play with three monitors in NVIDIA Surround, on curved monitors, and even in Virtual Reality. With Simultaneous Multi-Projection we can improve your experience on these new displays, and in Virtual Reality improve performance too.

In a 3-monitor Surround configuration, gamers typically angle the left and right monitors towards them, so that they can see more in their peripheral vision and fit the monitors on their desk. But because games can’t account for this perspective shift, the in-game scene is rendered incorrectly, and the image is rendered incorrectly.

With Perspective Surround, enabled by Simultaneous Multi-Projection, GeForce GTX delivers a proper view of the world. By creating multiple view ports of the game world you’re playing in, we can project accurate views of the world onto each monitor, improving the view of the world and the level of immersion.

Simultaneous Multi-Projection also benefits Virtual Reality users through the creation of two new performance-enhancing and image quality-improving techniques. The first is Lens Matched Shading, which improves pixel shading performance by rendering more natively to the unique dimensions of VR display output. This avoids rendering many pixels that would otherwise be discarded before the image is output to the VR headset.

The second technique is Single Pass Stereo, which increases geometry performance by allowing the headset’s left and right display to share a single geometry pass. We’re effectively halving the workload of traditional VR rendering, which requires the GPU to draw geometry twice—once for the left eye, and once for the right eye.

To learn more about the VRWorks aspects of Simultaneous Multi-Projection, and how they improve VR experiences, check out our VRWorks article.

The key to an immersive Virtual Reality experience is the feeling of being present in the game. Great graphics and realistic-looking worlds are particularly important for achieving this feeling of presence, and so to help developers add the required level of detail we've created the aforementioned Simultaneous Multi-Projection technologies.

But unlike a traditional game played on a monitor, Virtual Reality games allow players to reach and touch objects and surfaces, which adds a considerable amount of complexity for developers. To assist with challenges like this, we’ve brought our PhysX technology to VR.

With this technology embedded in a game, NVIDIA PhysX for VR detects when a hand controller interacts with a virtual object, and enables the game engine to provide a physically accurate visual and haptic response. It also models the physical behavior of the virtual world around the user so that all interactions - whether an explosion or a hand splashing through water - behave as if in the real world.

As well as enhancing your visual and physical experiences with PhysX for VR, we’re transforming the aural experience too, as audio can have a huge impact on presence in VR. Traditional VR audio provides an accurate 3D position of the sound source within a virtual environment. However, sound in the real world reflects more than just the location of the source. It’s changed by the physical environment as the waves move through walls and bounce off objects, creating echoes, reverberations, or muffled sound. We expect these subtle changes in real life, so their absence in virtual environments subtracts from the realism.

To solve this, NVIDIA has developed VRWorks Audio, our new path traced audio technology. Using, NVIDIA's OptiX ray tracing technology, we simulate the movement, or propagation, of sound within an environment, changing the sound in real-time based on the size, shape, and material properties of your virtual world--just as you'd experience in the real life.