Nvidia will be making several announcements this month as part of its annual GPU Technology Conference. Prior to this online event, Nvidia announced the announcements on Twitter, which generated further interest when the tweets were deleted.

The tweet originated from @NvidiaANZ, the company's official Twitter handle for news and announcements in Australia and New Zealand. eTeknix staffers were able to get the date (March 19, 2020) and screenshot consisting of an eyeball emoji and an interesting black-and-white animation.

Although no longer visible, the animation appeared to depict an eyeball tracking two points of light across the iris. Some speculate that this may have some connection to Nvidia's next-generation Ampere GPU, but TechPowerUp points out that it may actually refer to a technology called foveated rendering.

Technically, it could be both, but the latter is more plausible; foveated rendering is what Nvidia demonstrated at SIGGRAPH 2016. It is essentially an eye-tracking technique that makes rendering scenes in virtual reality less demanding on the hardware.

"Each new head-mounted display (HMD) resolution increases the number of pixels the GPU has to render. To maintain a fluid VR experience, we must continue to find new ways to optimize VR rendering performance. The advent of HMDs with integrated eye tracking offers new ways to improve both perceived visual quality and performance. This is because the human eye perceives visual quality differently across the entire field of view," Nvidia explained in a 2019 blog post.

Nvidia notes that the human eye only notices "maximum detail" in the fovea, a very narrow region of the eye. Peripheral vision is not as detailed and is generally blurry.

"VRS (variable rate shading) forbait rendering exploits this quirk of human perception to render at higher quality at the gazing point, while rendering at reduced quality in the peripheral regions," Nvidia states.

Nvidia's deleted tweet may or may not have heralded the commercialization of forbated rendering, whether related to Ampere or not. It could also be something completely different, possibly related to ray tracing; if there is an announcement on the 19th, we won't know for another week.