Foveated rendering is the virtual-reality display technique that renders the area where the eyes are looking in greater detail than the surrounding image. It takes advantage of the human eye’s much higher visual acuity at the fovea, the small central region of the retina.
In fixed foveated rendering, the high-detail area stays near the center of the display. Eye-tracked or dynamic foveated rendering moves that area as the user’s gaze changes. Peripheral regions can use lower resolution because people generally notice less detail there.
The technique can reduce the graphics-processing workload required for high-resolution VR. It is not the same as ray tracing, which calculates how light behaves in a scene, or texture mapping, which applies images to 3D surfaces. Accurate eye tracking is especially important for dynamic foveated rendering.