Changes to variable rate shading are aimed at improving power saving.
Valve is keen to hit the ground running when the Steam Deck launches next month, so keen in fact, Valve’s engineers are working on improving the AMD Vulkan Graphics API. As Phoronix reports, Valve’s Samuel Pitoiset has been working on the Radeon Vulkan RADV driver, and more specifically variable rate shading (VRS). In simple terms, VRS allows the amount of processing power required to render an image on the screen to vary for different parts of the image.
