A United States Patent Application made by AMD for variable rate shading (VRS) has been discovered. At present, the little-used technology only features in Turing-based cards from Nvidia; VRS can offer an fps increase in games that utilize it. It has been speculated that AMD plans to incorporate variable rate shading in its upcoming 7 nm Navi GPUs.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-patent-spotted-for-variable-rate-shading-as-featured-in-Nvidia-Turing-based-GPUs.411004.0.html