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PSVR 2: What Foveated Rendering Means
Sony recently revealed the technical specifications for its PlayStation VR 2 hardware, and the list of features includes the fancy-sounding term "foveated rendering." PSVR 2 is expected to be a significant upgrade over its PlayStation 4 predecessor, including displaying games in 4K, and foveated rendering may be an important component in the headset achieving satisfactory performance. Foveated rendering isn't really a new concept, and it's certainly not a proprietary term Sony invented, but it may not be familiar to those who don't actively follow the virtual reality side of the game industry.
Foveated rendering, as the term implies, is a certain method used to render the images displayed on a virtual reality screen. In practice, foveated rendering attempts to simulate the way a human eye works in order to save on hardware resources. Anything that the user is not looking at will be rendered at a reduced resolution, mimicking the way people can see objects in their peripheral vision without them being entirely in focus. If implemented correctly alongside PSVR 2's eye tracking technology, games could theoretically run a lot smoother at the high resolutions and frame rates the headset is targeting.
In an article about the evolution of foveated rendering in its own products, Qualcomm has a diagram (Figure 1 in the article) that helps visuals how foveated rendering might operate. In that example, areas in the center of the image are at maximum resolution, with the image incrementally losing quality as it moves toward the periphery. It's a fascinating concept, but its implementation in PSVR 2 can't be assessed until someone's gotten their hands on the still-mysterious headset.
Games Already Use Tech Similar To Foveated Rendering
Every piece of gaming software has to use rendering tricks like this in a tradeoff with the hardware of the system its running on. Most gamers at one point or another have probably noticed a correlation between the distance of an object and its level of detail (LOD). This is another rendering technique like foveated rendering that's used in order to balance the distribution of the hardware's resources. Even high-end gaming PCs can't render every single object on screen at its maximum resolution, so those in the distance that the player can't really see very well anyway get brought down to a lower LOD. Usually this result in a convincing illusion, since human eyes work kind of the same way, but it can be very noticeable when implemented poorly, like Battlefield 2042's character models turning 2D when viewed from a long distance.
If foveated rendering is put to good use, it will be a useful tool for developers in getting their games running on PSVR 2, and players hopefully won't even notice it. In fact, if foveated rendering were flawlessly implemented with PSVR 2's eye tracking, it should theoretically be impossible for a player to notice any drops in LOD, since the game would bring whatever object the player looks at back to full resolution. It remains to be seen exactly what the feature will look like in final practice, but titles like the recently announced Horizon Call of the Mountain could benefit greatly from foveated rendering, and the tech could potentially help make PlayStation VR 2 an impressive headset.
