An AMD patent application has been published today detailing its own method of variable rate shading – one of the key, non-RTX features of Nvidia’s latest Turing graphics card architecture. The application was filed back in 2017, and the timing does suggest there’s a good chance this could be part of the upcoming AMD Navi GPU architecture expected to launch in the summer.

Variable rate shading (VRS) is essentially a method for optimising the amount of work that your graphics silicon has to do at any one time. The idea being that because huge parts of a scene don’t actually change that much from frame-to-frame, yet the GPU has to start more or less afresh each time, there are potential performance boosts available.

VRS gives the GPU the ability to section out a frame and decide what needs fine grain rendering and which parts don’t need to be rendered in full detail. Basically it can vary the rate at which it shades different parts of a frame – sections with a lot of visible detail can remain at the standard rate, while things like walls or the sky can have a lower shading rate. This wouldn’t really affect image quality and yet can offer genuine gaming frame rate boosts.