Temporally Stable Content-Adaptive and Spatio-Temporal Shading Rate Assignment for Real-Time Applications

We propose two novel methods to improve the efficiency and quality of real-time rendering applications: Texel differential-based content-adaptive shading (TDCAS) and spatio-temporally filtered adaptive shading (STeFAS). Utilizing Variable Rate Shading (VRS)—a hardware feature introduced with NVIDIA’s Turing micro-architecture—and properties derived during rendering or Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA), our techniques adapt the resolution to improve the performance and quality of real-time applications. VRS enables different shading resolution for different regions of the screen during a single render pass. In contrast to other techniques, TDCAS and STeFAS have very little overhead for computing the shading rate. STeFAS enables up to 4x higher rendering resolutions for similar frame rates, or a performance increase of 4 × at the same resolution.