How NVIDIA Helps Give ‘Shadow Warrior 2’ an Edge

[HardOCP News]

Shadow Warrior 2, the highly anticipated first-person shooter that hit hard drives today, is focused on fun. But not to be missed behind the numerous weapon choices, over-the-top gore and edgy sense of humor is an indie release that is loaded with next-generation technology, thanks in part to a collaboration between NVIDIA and Flying Wild Hog, the game’s independent Poland-based developer. Published by Devolver Digital, the outfit behind indie hits like Hotline Miami and BroForce, Shadow Warrior 2 is a another example of Devolver Digital’s reach in the indie scene. Flying Wild Hog, along with Devolver sister company Gambitious, was a part of the NVIDIA Indie Spotlight program launch with their game Hard Reset: Redux. Our work with them on Shadow Warrior 2 has resulted in a game with stunning visuals that were aided by NVIDIA created or inspired technologies.

Shadow Warrior 2 uses NVIDIA Multi-Res Shading, which includes simultaneous multi-projection (SMP) technology built into NVIDIA Pascal GPUs to project images into multiple viewports. It can, for example, decrease the resolution of a game’s graphics on the periphery of the screen, improving performance without harming image quality on the center of the screen where a gamer’s eyes are focused during gameplay. This is the first time Multi-Res Shading technology has been used outside a VR application. By intelligently reducing the workload on the GPU, we gain a substantial amount of performance.

 

[DukenukemX]

Can't wait for the benchmarks on AMD hardware.

 

[Prisoner849]

Kind of hardware DOF then? Didn't look bad full screen at 1440p but hopefully a toggle, just in case.

 

[Stoly]

Kind of hardware DOF then? Didn't look bad full screen at 1440p but hopefully a toggle, just in case.

DOF was already done in hardware since NV30 IIRC. Multires renders at a lower resolution at the edges of the screen, but I guess you could do multires with DOF and motion blur as you wouldn't see the difference.

Multires has been long in coming. I first heard the idea back when the geforce2 came out IIRC. nvidia was looking for technologies to render parts of a scene at different LOD/resolution, but it was scrapped as it might be considered cheating. I recall the AF Optimizations fiasco, I guess this would have been much worse.

 

[GameLifter]

This looks interesting. I'm curious to see how noticeable the reduction in resolution on the edges of the screen is.

 

[DPI]

And this is why I only buy Nvidia.

 

[DukenukemX]

And this is why I only buy Nvidia.

I buy Nvidia because I want Nightmare fuel.

 

[JosiahBradley]

Game was on my radar, fuck it now.

 

[Azphira]

"How NVIDIA Helps Give ‘Shadow Warrior 2’ an Edge"

*looks at steam discussions*

"Infinite loading screen blues for me. Got a quad core CPU. Bug only occurs with SLI enabled. I have to disable it globally in order to get the game to run."

*looks back at article title* Uh huh..

 

[fs123]

Can't wait for the benchmarks on AMD hardware.

http://gamegpu.com/images/stories/Test_GPU/Action/Shadow_Warrior_2_/sw2_2560.png

Not quite sure why Nvidia is claiming 30% better performance when the AMD cards are actually matching or beating the equivalent Nvidia cards. I get 55-65 fps @1440P on my 390@1100MHz for reference.

If Nvidia is rendering at a lower resolution and only matching the AMD cards then I'd hate to see where they would be if they rendered at the full resolution like AMD .

 

[thesmokingman]

Oh the comedy...

 

[renz496]

http://gamegpu.com/images/stories/Test_GPU/Action/Shadow_Warrior_2_/sw2_2560.png

Not quite sure why Nvidia is claiming 30% better performance when the AMD cards are actually matching or beating the equivalent Nvidia cards. I get 55-65 fps @1440P on my 390@1100MHz for reference.

If Nvidia is rendering at a lower resolution and only matching the AMD cards then I'd hate to see where they would be if they rendered at the full resolution like AMD .

game gpu disabled MSR in their test

http://gamegpu.com/images/stories/T...2_/ShadowWarrior2_2016_10_12_10_58_41_045.jpg

also when nvidia say 30% faster it is not compared to AMD equivalent hardware. it can be 30% faster compared to when the feature being turned off on their own hardware.