Game renderers do sample time too, for per-object motion blur[1] and sometimes full-scene blur or AA. To push the idea further, research has been done around 'frameless' renderers, where you never render a complete frame but sample ~randomly at successive times and accumulate into the frame(sic)buffer. At low resolution it feels weird but very natural, computed persistence of vision : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycSpSSt-yVs . I love how even at low res, you get valuable perception.
[1] some renderers even take advantage of that to increase performance since you get a more human oriented feel by rendering less precisely.
Speaking of "frameless" rendering, I noticed during Carmack's Oculus keynote (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gn8m5d74fk8#t=764), he talks about trying to persuade Samsung to integrate programmable interlacing into their displays in order to give dynamic per-frame control over which lines are being scanned.
This would give you the same "adaptive per-pixel updating" seen in your link, though primarily to tackle the problems with HMDs (low-persistence at high frame-rates).
It's a proprietary nVidia technology that essentially does reverse V-Sync. Instead of having the video card render a frame and wait for the monitor to be ready to draw it like normal V-Sync, the monitor waits for the video card to hand it a finished frame before drawing, keeping the old frame on-screen as long as needed. The article goes into a little more detail; they take advantage of the VBLANK interval (legacy from the CRT days) to get the display to act like this.
Weird, I missed this part. Vaguely reminds me of E. Sutherland fully lazy streamed computer graphics generation since they had no framebuffer at the time.
[1] some renderers even take advantage of that to increase performance since you get a more human oriented feel by rendering less precisely.