With only a few days until the Oculus Rift starts shipping to consumers, the VR company has announced that its SDK for the Rift now supports Asynchronous Timewarp (ATW). It might not sound like much, but it actually improves the VR experience.
ATW renders a scene before it reaches your eyes, but also handles head movement and shifts by your head, before the Rift renders it to your eyes. Thanks to ATW, we have reduced latency, smoother movements and improved efficiency. Oculus says that ATW reduces judder (in the form of shaking and vibration) that is produced when a frame is displayed out of sync, because the hardware wasn't capable of rendering the frame quick enough.
Oculus teamed with Microsoft, NVIDIA and AMD to make the best of GPU preemption (rendering a scene before it's required), to its new SDK. Our Rift should ship on March 28, so expect a constant flow of VR-related content starting in April.