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VR to be worth $100M claims AMD

by on16 December 2015

But not until 2020

Enthusiasts, or those with the cash for a Radeon Fury X and Geforce GTX 980 TI or Titan, expect to see a boom of VR devices such as HTC Vive or the Oculus Rift. But according to AMD's CFO the VR business will start making some serious money only in 2020. 

The first consumer devices including HTC Vive and Oculus should start shipping in early 2016, unless they are delayed further. You will need quite a high end computer to run these games and demos.

There is  severe shortage of VR content but there is little doubt that VR will become successful in a few generations. Devinder Kumar who works as a Chief Financial Officer of AMD believes that AR and VR combined might grow to a $100M by 2020. He talked about it at least week's Raymond James Technology Investors Conference. His exact words were

You mentioned VR, that’s the question of the future. I think we are and then there is also augmented reality, AR is going to be a trend that continues, but from a revenue or significant revenue standpoint we see that the multiyear times and we go out to 2020 timeframe, I’ve seen numbers and terms of offers of $100 million of revenue in that area.

He believes that only a few companies can make low latency VR hardware. Radeon Technology Group created and lead by Raja Koduri was definitely one of them. The other will be Nvidia with everyone else lagging behind at least in the beginning.

There will be some mobile phones/ tablets graphics manufacturers that will go after Virtual Reality but since the GPU on these devices is inferior there is no doubt that the experience will be rubbish.

The Oculus or HTC Vive needs at least Geforce GTX 970 or Radeon Fury or faster hardware to offer you good frame rates and experience. These cards have 145W TDP or higher and  they perform much better than the Snapdragon 820 / Apple A9 / Snapdragon 8890 or any other mobile SoC. The modern phone SoC is limited to 2W TDP for the CPU and GPU while the tablet part has 5W TDP and there is no chance in hell that you can get similar performance of the 150W TDP part. 

Last modified on 16 December 2015
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