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AMD-powered Sulon Q shows amazing promise as a combined AR and VR device, but so far is only a sneak peak.

AMD's CEO Lisa Su and SVP Raja Koduri both came out strong for VR at the company's pre-GDC "Capsaicin" event — naming VR, forth with gaming, as AMD's top two markets going forward. To convince united states of america it's not only serious, simply that it has the goods to back up its ambitions, AMD rolled out both new VR-friendly GPUs and brought out over a dozen execs from a broad-variety of VR and gaming related companies to sing the praises of its latest hardware and software during a two-hour press conference marathon.

Making VR get faster with LiquidVR

Showcasing VR at it pre-GDC extravaganza shows how serious AMD is about the marketUsing better hardware and software to make VR go faster was a mutual thread across all the presentations, and the demos, at Capsaicin. Top of the list is accelerating what VR developers call "motion to photon" — reducing the lag between when yous motility your head and the display catches up. Faster response not only makes for a more-realistic VR feel, only is a primal cistron in reducing the motion sickness induced in many people by laggy VR offerings. The trouble is that not merely does a VR feel need to exist producing frames at 90fps for smoothen motility, it needs to produce two of them at a time (i for each eye). Then, instead the more than-traditional 60fps target for most games, the GPU and CPU need to exist churning out 180 frames every second — with a lag of less than 15 milliseconds to get to the sweetness spot of responsiveness.

AMD has innovated in a number of areas to assist developers accomplish this goal. LiquidVR is their proper noun for a set of capabilities that it is making available with its newest GPU offerings. In item, LiquidVR offers back up for Asynchronous Shaders (allowing more parallelization of processing), multi-GPU support, and Late Latch (for async update, allowing faster response to sensors). Under the covers, LiquidVR besides implements Direct-to-Brandish rendering to supported VR devices, bypassing the OS for lower latency.

AMD's SVP and event host Raja Koduri provided the sobering prediction that we will eventually need GPUs that are 1 million times faster than what we have now

AMD'south SVP and event host Raja Koduri provided the sobering prediction that we volition somewhen need GPUs that are 1 million times faster than what we have now

Of class, more than efficient software is only part of the solution for developers. AMD too showcased its massively-powerful new dual GPU graphics accelerator — the new Radeon Pro Duo (that we covered separately) — and demoed its Polaris 10 and Polaris 11 side by side-generation GPUs. The Polaris 10 was shown running Hitman and Battlefront in fairly-disarming fashion. I was able to demo a passively cooled Polaris xi running a VR video on an Oculus DK2, which worked well given the limited ambitions. AMD is hoping the passive cooling adequacy will allow it to deploy the Polaris 11 in some new situations, like theaters or other shared venues, that haven't had access to high-quality VR playback before. On the more traditional graphics front end, AMD also announced that it was providing a free rendering library — Burn Renderer — that will natively be able to take advantage of the dual GPUs on the Fire Pro Duo.

AMD rolls out an all-star array of industry supporters for its efforts

Most of the two-hour-long announcement was taken up with testimonials from industry partners making use of AMD'south new products — for gaming, 3D rendering, and VR. Many were expected, just there were some interesting applications mentioned. For example, with high-end Cinematic VR, it has been very difficult for directors to get realtime view of what is being shot because of the massive processing requirements. Matthew Lewis, Director of Pull a fast one on's newly-announced Assassin's Creed: VR Experience, said that AMD'due south new Radeon Pro Duo allowed him to go on up with filming the style he has ever wanted to.

Cevat Yerlic, of Crytek, took the opportunity to appear that their VR First academic initiative is now existence rolled out at eight institutions, including CSU Monterey Bay, Purdue, RIT, USC, and the University of Florida in the US. Those schools will go evolution systems that include AMD Pro Dual hardware.

Die & Square Enix are using AMD-supported GPUOpen to quickly remap functionality onto new hardware. Nathan Griffiths of AP and Sean Liu of 360 Video both explained how the improve performance made possible with AMD'south LiquidVR and its new GPUs was improving their workflow and allowing them to go their journalistic content published in a more timely fashion.

For those used to the dominant marketplace share of Nvidia in the desktop GPU marketplace, AMD provided the interesting statistic that 83% of VR systems are powered by AMD (which of grade includes a big number of consoles). That gives its efforts in the area quite a bit of weight among both hardware and software developers. One illustration was the advent of execs from both HTC and HP on stage to promote their partnerships with AMD in optimizing their users' experience of VR.

Sulon Q and its Magic Beans stole the testify

For those who have been impressed by demo videos from Magic Leap or Microsoft's HoloLens, the demo video from startup Sulon is at least every bit impressive. The "Magic Beans" video that was projected on stage was shot through Sulon Q hardware, and combined a remarkably realistic augmented reality scene that segued into a VR feel. The object tracking and alignment of the AR sequence was superb — which Sulon attributes to processing its forward-facing images in real time with its proprietary Spatial Processing Unit (like Microsoft and Google, Sulon has realized that custom hardware is needed for realtime AR). Like so many early AR demos, though, it was shot in the company's part, so we didn't get to come across anything happening live.

AMD sees devices like the Sulon Q as making VR experiences available to many more people through shared experiences like iCafes

AMD sees devices like the Sulon Q as making VR experiences bachelor to many more people through shared experiences like iCafes

Similar Microsoft's HoloLens, the Sulon Q is united nations-tethered — a huge advantage. However, the Q is a total-face headset (like the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive), rather than a meet-through display. That gives it a meliorate power to do real VR, and a wider field of view, just does mean that the user's view of the exterior world when used in an AR mode is provided entirely by cameras — making the rapid processing of camera data especially important. Sulon CEO waved a prototype of the Q around on stage, but otherwise kept it carefully subconscious under his jacket, and later under glass, and then the just glimpse we got of what it will exist able to do was the projected video.

The Sulon Q hardware runs Windows 10 on its embedded AMD FX-8800P processor with Radeon R7 Graphics (four compute and 8 GPU cores), and features a 110-caste FOV on its 2560×1440 display. It has an interface for controlling the Windows UI from the device, but we didn't see that demonstrated. The device supports DirectX 12 and Vulkan, besides as integrating AMD's LiquidVR engineering. Rounding out its capabilities is AstoundSound for 3D spatial audio, besides as a pair of dissonance-canceling microphones. Sulon claims its device is "coming in Leap," although we assume that volition exist an early developer edition, rather than a total-on consumer release. Either mode, information technology has huge potential to be a flagship in this infinite, as getting rid of the tether, and having a unmarried device that supports both AR and VR is something of a Holy Grail in the mixed-reality marketplace.

The Capsaicin result was one more illustration that GPU vendors realize that VR (and AR), along with automobile learning, correspond some of the largest potential growth areas for their businesses. It was too good to see AMD's focus on cross-platform solutions like Vulkan, as in that location are a growing number of unlike platforms and markets that are all worthy of investment and attention.

[Image credits: David Primal]

In fourth dimension for GDC 2022 and VRDC, we're covering VR, gaming, and augmented reality all this week; bank check out the rest of our VR Week stories for more in-depth coverage.