Registered Extension Number

88

Revision

1

Ratification Status

Not ratified

Extension and Version Dependencies

None

Contact

Other Extension Metadata

Last Modified Date

2017-02-15

Contributors
  • Eric Werness, NVIDIA

  • Kedarnath Thangudu, NVIDIA

Description

Virtual Reality (VR) applications often involve a post-processing step to apply a “barrel” distortion to the rendered image to correct the “pincushion” distortion introduced by the optics in a VR device. The barrel distorted image has lower resolution along the edges compared to the center. Since the original image is rendered at high resolution, which is uniform across the complete image, a lot of pixels towards the edges do not make it to the final post-processed image.

This extension provides a mechanism to render VR scenes at a non-uniform resolution, in particular a resolution that falls linearly from the center towards the edges. This is achieved by scaling the w coordinate of the vertices in the clip space before perspective divide. The clip space w coordinate of the vertices can be offset as of a function of x and y coordinates as follows:

w' = w + Ax + By

In the intended use case for viewport position scaling, an application should use a set of four viewports, one for each of the four quadrants of a Cartesian coordinate system. Each viewport is set to the dimension of the image, but is scissored to the quadrant it represents. The application should specify A and B coefficients of the w-scaling equation above, that have the same value, but different signs, for each of the viewports. The signs of A and B should match the signs of x and y for the quadrant that they represent such that the value of w' will always be greater than or equal to the original w value for the entire image. Since the offset to w, (Ax + By), is always positive, and increases with the absolute values of x and y, the effective resolution will fall off linearly from the center of the image to its edges.

New Commands

New Structures

New Enum Constants

Issues

1) Is the pipeline structure name too long?

RESOLVED: It fits with the naming convention.

2) Separate W scaling section or fold into coordinate transformations?

RESOLVED: Leaving it as its own section for now.

Examples

VkViewport viewports[4];
VkRect2D scissors[4];
VkViewportWScalingNV scalings[4];

for (int i = 0; i < 4; i++) {
    int x = (i & 2) ? 0 : currentWindowWidth / 2;
    int y = (i & 1) ? 0 : currentWindowHeight / 2;

    viewports[i].x = 0;
    viewports[i].y = 0;
    viewports[i].width = currentWindowWidth;
    viewports[i].height = currentWindowHeight;
    viewports[i].minDepth = 0.0f;
    viewports[i].maxDepth = 1.0f;

    scissors[i].offset.x = x;
    scissors[i].offset.y = y;
    scissors[i].extent.width = currentWindowWidth/2;
    scissors[i].extent.height = currentWindowHeight/2;

    const float factor = 0.15;
    scalings[i].xcoeff = ((i & 2) ? -1.0 : 1.0) * factor;
    scalings[i].ycoeff = ((i & 1) ? -1.0 : 1.0) * factor;
}

VkPipelineViewportWScalingStateCreateInfoNV vpWScalingStateInfo = { VK_STRUCTURE_TYPE_PIPELINE_VIEWPORT_W_SCALING_STATE_CREATE_INFO_NV };

vpWScalingStateInfo.viewportWScalingEnable = VK_TRUE;
vpWScalingStateInfo.viewportCount = 4;
vpWScalingStateInfo.pViewportWScalings = &scalings[0];

VkPipelineViewportStateCreateInfo vpStateInfo = { VK_STRUCTURE_TYPE_PIPELINE_VIEWPORT_STATE_CREATE_INFO };
vpStateInfo.viewportCount = 4;
vpStateInfo.pViewports = &viewports[0];
vpStateInfo.scissorCount = 4;
vpStateInfo.pScissors = &scissors[0];
vpStateInfo.pNext = &vpWScalingStateInfo;

Example shader to read from a w-scaled texture:

// Vertex Shader
// Draw a triangle that covers the whole screen
const vec4 positions[3] = vec4[3](vec4(-1, -1, 0, 1),
                                  vec4( 3, -1, 0, 1),
                                  vec4(-1,  3, 0, 1));
out vec2 uv;
void main()
{
    vec4 pos = positions[ gl_VertexID ];
    gl_Position = pos;
    uv = pos.xy;
}

// Fragment Shader
uniform sampler2D tex;
uniform float xcoeff;
uniform float ycoeff;
out vec4 Color;
in vec2 uv;

void main()
{
    // Handle uv as if upper right quadrant
    vec2 uvabs = abs(uv);

    // unscale: transform w-scaled image into an unscaled image
    //   scale: transform unscaled image int a w-scaled image
    float unscale = 1.0 / (1 + xcoeff * uvabs.x + xcoeff * uvabs.y);
    //float scale = 1.0 / (1 - xcoeff * uvabs.x - xcoeff * uvabs.y);

    vec2 P = vec2(unscale * uvabs.x, unscale * uvabs.y);

    // Go back to the right quadrant
    P *= sign(uv);

    Color = texture(tex, P * 0.5 + 0.5);
}

Version History

  • Revision 1, 2017-02-15 (Eric Werness)

    • Internal revisions

See Also

No cross-references are available

Document Notes

For more information, see the Vulkan Specification.

This page is a generated document. Fixes and changes should be made to the generator scripts, not directly.

Copyright 2014-2026 The Khronos Group Inc.

SPDX-License-Identifier: CC-BY-4.0