The Unity game engine is building its VR capabilities with support for Nvidia VRWorks and AMD LiquidVR, Unity Technologies announced at the Game Developers Conference today. Coupled with new features from Chip makers ARM and Imagination, also announced today, game studios will soon have more options for building intense realism and VR into their latest titles.
With support for AMD and Nvidia's VR platforms built into the upcoming Unity 5.4 release, gamers can look forward to new visual features, improved performance, and a major VR rendering upgrade, the company said in a statement.
There are already several VR games built on the Unity platform, but support for VRWorks means that implementation will be a lot easier for developers going forward.
And it's not just about games: Unity serves more than 5 million developers, from major studios to students and hobbyists. Some of those developers are using Unity to create VR experiences for medical, tourism, and education applications, according to Nvidia.
Besides VR, implementing realistic large worlds is also a challenge for game developers: how do you maintain the same lighting quality for elements in the background as those closer to the camera without bogging down the GPU and sacrificing the user experience?
ARM's Enlighten illumination engine is getting an update that will allow programmers to better address the issue. At GDC, ARM announced new features in Enlighten that make it possible to achieve dynamic global illumination while keeping frame rates at 30fps or above.
The key to success is dynamic resolution levels. Distant geometry, such gorges, forests, and beaches, can now be rendered at a lower resolution than nearby geometry, like the game's character in the foreground. That means studios can either improve performance without degrading the user experience, or achieve higher-quality lighting while keeping the same minimum hardware specs.
Enlighten's engine is used in popular game titles like Hellblade, Need for Speed and Street Fighter V. Its global illumination harnesses the CPU's power independent of the main GPU rendering, which means it doesn't directly impact the frame rate.
ARM is showcasing Enlighten's new features at GDC with PC and PlayStation 4 game demos developed by Ninja Theory, the studio behind Hellblade.
But ARM is not the only company working on better lighting solutions for games. British chip maker Imagination announced a new tool that will reduce the amount of time it game artists takes to create lightmaps, a type of cache that stores the brightness of various game surfaces.
Designed for the Unity game engine, the lightmapping tool is based on Imagination's PowerVR GPU and will be included in Unity 5.4.