Impact of Foveated Rendering on Path Tracing Frame Rate in Head-Mounted VR Displays

Tom Axblad

Abstract

The combination of eye tracking and HMDs benefit each other in many ways, one such benefit is foveated rendering, which reduces latency in software made for VR especially well. Real time ray tracing and path tracing have gained interest from companies, developers and consumers after recent research and hardware improve on both technologies significantly. For this project a path tracing rendering system made for VR is built, and an evaluation is made to find the impact of foveated rendering on the frame rate for the built system. Results show that depending on the features included and where the gaze point is located, foveated rendering provides an increase in frame rates between 1.59 and 10.22 times higher than the same system without foveated rendering. To conclude, foveated rendering provides a significant impact on frame rates for path tracing in VR. However, further iterations of the implementation and evaluation is necessary to reach more accurate conclusions to the research question.