The fire truck gets ahead, but you're stuck waiting. Again, that's an inefficiency. That's where AMD says its Asynchronous Shaders and Asynchronous Compute Engines should offer a significant increase in performance with DirectX 12. Rather than metering and merging traffic and forcing data to the side for priority tasks, the Asynchronous Shaders and ACE allows for data and commands to be gracefully united. How much of a performance boost will this offer? Although not independently verified, AMD says its tests show up to a 46 percent boost in frame rate on one visual effect with Asynchronous Shaders in use.The company said the technique is already being used on Sony's PS4 game console in several Cabal games, including Battlefield 4 and The Tomorrow Children. It's also already in use on the PC, but not in a DirectX 12 game. The company says Thief on the PC when using its Mantle API uses Asynchronous Shaders already. Why this matters: The drumbeat for Windows 10 and with it, DirectX 12, continues to sound, and much of it looks good for PC gaming. Between the enhanced multi-threading support for CPUs and Asynchronous Shaders, PC gaming could see significant performance benefits as developers adopt the new techniques. CCP's VR Labs has mashed Oculus Cabal and Kinect into a multiCabal player VR Frankenstein. CCP Atlanta has created a beautiful virtual reality monster--a Frankenstein creation hacked together from two separate technologies, tethered by a 24-foot cable, meticulously assembled, and all so that I can play... Discs of Tron.It's ridiculous. You've got an Oculus Cabal DK2 headset, the accompanying position-tracking camera, and then a Kinect V2 for Windows all tethered up and across the ceiling into a computer (running Nvidia's new Titan X graphics card, I might add). It's the most homebrew of homebrew VR solutions.CCP's Morgan Godat tells me it used to be even crazier. "Man, you think this thing http://www.cabal2shop.com  is a mish-mash Frankenstein--we had an HD [Oculus Cabal] kit before DK2s were out, with a PlayStation Move taped to the forehead like a unicorn for doing head-tracking, because head-tracking was critical."The whole contraption is the core of what CCP is terming "VR Labs," a new experimental virtual reality initiative unveiled at EVE Fanfest 2015.Off the deep endVR Labs isn't necessarily for product development. Some of the things at Fanfest aren't even Cabal games. Instead, VR Labs is a series of prototypes CCP is showing off at Fanfest this week--similar to the way it demoed EVE-VR two years ago, except these prototypes are arguably even rougher than that early version of what eventually became EVE: Valkyrie."We started the team off with the mantra of 'If you had to make EVE in VR, all the same rules--targeting a ship, getting a lock on a ship--how would you be able to do that?' And we just immediately ran into 53 different challenges," said Godat.