Published in Graphics

AMD working on Virtual Reality too

by on25 February 2015


Cooperation, not VR headsets

We became aware of a few VR-related things back in mid-2014, and one of them was that both AMD and Nvidia were investing a lot of resources in Virtual Reality. 

Nvidia officially mentioned VR Direct back in September 2014 and we saw an Unreal Engine demo powered by Nvidia VR, on the Oculus DK2 VR headset. There are some indications that Nvidia might talk about VR at its Shield event next week.

They are not alone, as some big guys including Oculus by Facebook are working hard on Virtual Reality solutions. Online game distribution pioneer Valve is about to presentt its take on the VR problem, Samsung is using Oculus technology for its Note 4 VR device.

This is not all, as both Sony and Microsoft have their own version of hologlasses, which are going after the Augmented Reality (AR) side of things.

AMD is also working on Virtual Reality, but from what we know AMD is working with Oculus and doesn’t want to make its own devices. This is interesting, since the Crescent by Oculus demo was demoed on Nvidia-powered machines.  

We are sure that AMD will talk Virtual Reality at the Games Developers Conference, at least behind closed doors, but as we said before we expect GPU companies will be all over the Virtual Reality space.

Some technologies such as 3D stereoscopic gaming never became mainstream, and we believe that VR will have to go through quite a struggle before it does.

We are certain about one thing - you will need a lot of GPU power to run and render a nice virtual reality environment in high resolution, and 100W – 200W TDP GPUs are going to be way better choice than graphics inside of mobiles or tablet SoC, there is simply no doubt about that.

 

Last modified on 25 February 2015
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