An open-source tool for Windows PCs with Nvidia GPUs adds eye-tracked foveated rendering to a huge number of SteamVR games.
Called PimaxMagic4All, the tool re-implements a feature Pimax ships in its Pimax Play software used to set up and adjust its headsets. As such, if you already own a Pimax headset, you don’t need this new tool.
PimaxMagic4All should work with any SteamVR-compatible headset that exposes a low-level public API to retrieve eye tracking data, or which has third-party software that does so, including:
- Meta Quest Pro (via Steam Link or Virtual Desktop)
- PlayStation VR2 (via PSVR2Toolkit)
- Samsung Galaxy XR (via Virtual Desktop)
- Play For Dream MR (via Virtual Desktop)
- Varjo Aero
What Is Foveated Rendering?
- Fixed Foveated Rendering (FFR) means rendering the central area of the image at a higher resolution than the peripheral area.
- Eye-Tracked Foveated Rendering (ETFR), occasionally also called Dynamic Foveated Rendering, means rendering the area you’re looking at each frame at higher resolution than everywhere else, determined by the eye tracking capability of some headsets.
Both techniques save performance in VR, and this can be used to either run demanding experiences at a smoother framerate or render experiences already hitting framerate at higher peak resolution.
FFR comes with noticeable pixelation at the edges, but works on any headset, while with ETFR there shouldn’t be any noticeable difference, assuming the eye tracking system has low enough latency.
The developer says that it should “likely” work with Valve’s Steam Frame too, when streaming from a Windows PC with an Nvidia GPU, and in theory could work with HTC Vive Pro Eye and Vive Focus Vision with additional development time.
The developer, by the way, is Matthieu Bucchianeri, a name you may recognize if you’re a regular UploadVR reader.
Bucchianeri is a very experienced developer, having worked on the PS4 and original PlayStation VR at Sony, Falcon 9 and Dragon at SpaceX, and HoloLens and Windows MR at Microsoft, where he currently works on Xbox. At Microsoft he contributed to OpenXR, and in his spare time he developed OpenXR Toolkit, VDXR (Virtual Desktop’s OpenXR runtime), and most recently Oasis, the native SteamVR driver that revived Windows MR headsets.
PimaxMagic4All has a simple graphical interface with three levels of foveated rendering: Maximum, Balanced, and Minimum. You can choose between prioritizing increasing performance, achieving a result where you shouldn’t notice the difference, or a balance of the two.
The tool can inject foveated rendering into any title that uses the DirectX 11 graphics API and OpenVR, Valve’s deprecated API for SteamVR. The game also needs to not have an anti-cheat system, since those will prevent code injection. And remember, you need to have an Nvidia graphics card.
You can find a small list of supported titles on the GitHub project’s wiki page, and it includes Half-Life: Alyx, Skyrim VR, Fallout 4 VR, Elite Dangerous, Assetto Corsa, and Boneworks. But this is only a fraction of the total number of games that should be supported in theory.
Note that three titles you won’t need this for are Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, DCS, and iRacing, since all three now support OpenXR eye-tracked foveated rendering natively.
David Heaney
PimaxMagic4All is available on GitHub, where you’ll find both the source code and compiled releases.
