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Comment by scott_karana | Hacker News Reader

Would dual GPUs help the problem?

You could have one low-resolution GPU (such as an onboard Intel HD) and another focusing solely on rendering the foevated patch.

5ms per 320x240 section might not be implausible?

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The problem isn't solely in rendering fast enough--it's end-to-end latency. Keep in mind that if your eye is being tracked by a 120Hz camera, that's 1/120 =~ 8.3ms latency just from inter-frame time alone. Add to that all sorts of communication bus overhead, image processing the eye tracking imagery to figure out eye direction, potential buffering in the display adapter, 5ms is not really possible, yet.

That said, I don't think there's theoretical limitations that prevent extremely low latency systems from happening, it's just not something we've kept in mind when designing modern consumer hardware.

Would you be able to throw hardware at it? You could render in high-detail not just the area that your eye can see well, but also the area around it which it could be pointing at if it moved during your measurement latency. (Can your eye look anywhere in your image within 20ms? I honestly have no idea.)

Yikes, that makes sense. Thank you for spelling it out a bit! :)

Yeah, I'm not an expert in this area, but my casual reading seems to make it out to be similar to the problems you have with a lot of VR stuff, where the hardware just hasn't needed to be ultra-low-latency before now, but that there aren't necessarily hard limits that would prevent it.

If they ever get it ironed out, it seems like the kind of thing that could offer pretty huge advantages for gaming, if just one person is looking at the screen (I have no idea if anyone's considering multiple sets of eyes to track or if that introduces particularly novel problems that wouldn't be covered in solving the single set of eyes)

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