Pimax GTC2019 Announcement---Brainwarp Technology

SAN JOSE, Calif.—GPU Technology Conference—March 19th, 2019—Pimax, a leading innovator in immersive virtual reality hardware, announced today it is officially making available its new Brainwarp version 1.0, which includes a set of three technologies – Smart Smoothing, Fixed Foveated Rendering (FFR) and Refresh Rate Switching (RRS) – at the NVIDIA 2019 GPU Technology Conference (GTC). These experience-enhancing tools can be enabled or disabled individually and even combined to create powerful VR experiences on both high-end and medium-range graphics hardware. These new tools combined with Pimax’s many regular updates to its software package will ensure a smooth and optimized VR experience, allowing customers to fully enjoy the thousands of exciting VR software titles on the market today and new experiences added every day.

Brainwarp is a set of technologies enabled by NVIDIA VRWorks, a suite of APIs, libraries and engines that enable application and headset developers to create amazing VR experiences.
With NVIDIA VRWorks, Brainwarp considerably reduces hardware requirements, limits latency, and boosts refresh rates to enable high-quality content and smooth VR experiences. These new tools benefit a wide range of video hardware, enabling compatibility with mid-range graphics and enhancing frame rate on high-end hardware even for the most demanding software titles.

The Smart Smoothing algorithm compensates for low frame rates that can be experienced from demanding VR software titles especially using high-resolution hardware by calculating and adding frames as necessary for the best experience. For example: Take a headset with a 90Hz refresh rate running a demanding software title. When the frame rate of the game is 45FPS to 89FPS (frames per second), the function will automatically switch on to allow VR applications to continue to run smoothly. “With the VRWorks SDK, you can count on the lowest latency and highest performance with leading VR headsets,” said David Weinstein, Director of Virtual Reality at NVIDIA. “NVIDIA SDK support for setting context priority helps headset developers gain finer control for switching between graphics contexts and warp contexts. ”

With Smart Smoothing, users will enjoy high performance using the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 or GTX 1070 GPU when playing most VR games with the Pimax 8K, 5K Plus or 5K XR headsets.

To further improve the performance and reduce the hardware requirements, Pimax has introduced Fixed Foveated Rendering, or FFR, which works by rendering the center of the lenses at full resolution and progressively diminishing the resolution outward toward the users’ peripheral vision. When this function is enabled, it improves the performance of typical VR games by 10-30% (based on Pimax’s internal testing). The specific performance improvement varies from game to game and compatibility with this feature is currently limited to NVIDIA RTX GPUs.

（Game content from ShadowLegendVR）

Another exciting new feature is Pimax’s Refresh Rate Switching (RRS), which can also be used in conjunction with Smart Smoothing and FFR. With different mode options for the refresh rate (5K Plus: 90/72/64Hz, 8K: 80/72/64Hz), users are free to select the mode for their desired use with different games to achieve an optimized experience. For example, if the frame rate of the game is 36FPS and the user chooses a refresh rate of 72Hz, Smart Smoothing can work even with mid-level graphics cards. High-end graphics hardware also benefits from these techniques as they can be combined to dramatically increase the super sampling, texture resolution, anti-aliasing and more to achieve the most immersive experience.

“We have worked incredibly hard on the development of Brainwarp since 2017, and we’re happy to announce its official release at GTC 2019. Empowered by NVIDIA VRWorks, we have fulfilled our goal to bring a cutting-edge immersive VR experience to our users. We truly appreciate the community for the useful feedback throughout the process of beta testing,” said Kevin Henderson, US Head of Operations and company spokesperson at Pimax VR.

Pimax is co-exhibiting with Ecoplants at GTC 2019, Booth #1716 at the San Jose Convention Center.

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