
But in most games - as in the real world - relatively little changes from frame to frame. Virtually all of today’s games render new frames “from scratch”, meaning that they generally don’t use calculations made prior to that frame (except for temporal anti-aliasing, NVIDIA DLSS, and the occasional post processing technique). So by using VRS, their shading rate can be decreased without affecting image quality to any appreciable degree, giving the game an instant performance boost. These areas are motion blurred to add to the sense of speed, and are therefore difficult for a player to perceive during gameplay.

The area next to the car has been shaded once per four pixels (green), and the road to the far left and right periphery has been shaded once per eight pixels (yellow). The colored overlay on the right side shows a possible application to a frame - the car, sky, and foliage have been shaded at full rate (i.e., blue region) to preserve fine details. In the visualization image below, you can see how VRS can apply different shading rates in a scene. So by reducing the shading rate of numerous pixels per frame, GPU workload is decreased, increasing performance. For example, black pixels in a shadow look no different when the shading rate is reduced. Under the hood, developer-made algorithms identify pixels that the player can’t easily see and pixels that infrequently change or update, and use VRS to reduce the rate at which they are rendered (shaded).
