Story time!

I was developing for VR in late 2010s when this (at the time known as asynchronous timewarp and async spacewarp) came out for SteamVR and Oculus. I'm kind of close to this tech stack, and when I watched the LTT video I had a massive OMG DERRRRRR moment about its wider use cases. I distinctly remember jonesing hard for it, honestly ASW felt like an unfair mode for Oculus vs HTC - SteamVR was behind the ball and took a few months to catch up.

This could be a true game-changer. Get it? Dad jokes aside, this simple build toggle makes all the effort put into fancy DLSS AI upscaling almost seem wasted.

Basically, there is a very clever way to render static objects (terrain, immovable scene elements like trees or walls) for much lower overhead with almost unnoticeable tradeoffs. This is especially true in that 60-120Hz sweet spot for gaming.

Its super easy for developers to implement (literally a 'turn it on' toggle is great for 95% use cases) and is very mature; wireless VR depends on this technology to be viable. It is non-proprietary and works well on Red or Green hardware, probably Blue too.



Like Linus, I'm kind of shocked that nobody (including me) seems to have noticed that it could be useful for non-VR applications. Its worth noting that while simple to implement (and easy to turn off if you don't like it as a user) this needs to be enabled at build time and can't just be turned on for existing games.

TDLR; If this graphics option gains traction for flatscreen gaming, millions of users could gain a multi-generational performance boost, like a free 1070ti to 3080 upgrade.

This could be terrible news for NVIDIA, already having trouble finding gamers who need their expensive new 40- series cards, but also may provide massive headroom for truly next-generation graphics fidelity.

This sounds awesome but the pessimist in me wonders if it has been considered by developers already and rejected for some reason that might not be obvious. Be interesting if some devs could do a new build of their game & throw it in front of a few thousand people to get some feedback [if they haven't already].