AMD Navi may feature variable rate shading like NVIDIA Turing
AMD may be looking to implement variable rate shading technology, according to a patent filed by the company in 2017. Considering that NVIDIA is already offering adaptive rate shading with their Turing architecture, it wouldn’t be too much to ask from AMD to implement the technology in AMD Navi.
Variable rate shading will allow the cards to deliver higher performance by simply having to shade less. NVIDIA’s implementation allows them to do up to 40% less pixel shading in areas which you won’t be paying much attention to, giving you the same visual experience while improving performance.
AMD decision to go down a similar route, may be partially driven by the fact that they will be powering the next-gen consoles as well. Consoles have to be relatively affordable, so AMD can’t go ahead and cram massive GPUs like the Vega 20 just to support the 4K visuals that gamers will be expecting from the consoles. AMD’s variable rate shading might just be the solution to that.
Whether AMD will actually bring it to Navi remains to be seen, but we might be able to confirm it pretty soon with AMD expected to announce AMD Navi and AMD Zen 2 at Computex 2019.
Pokdepinion: Anything for better frame rates, as long as it doesn’t translate to worse quality visuals.
