AMD doubles down on VR with Sulon Q, LiquidVR

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, along side gaming, as AMD’s top two markets going ahead. To convince us it’s not best serious, however that it has the products to again up its pursuits, AMD rolled out each new VR-pleasant GPUs and taken out over a dozen execs from a huge-kind of VR and gaming associated corporations to sing the praises of its trendy hardware and software all through a -hour press conference marathon.

Making VR cross faster with LiquidVR

the use of better hardware and software to make VR pass faster became a not unusual thread throughout all of the shows, and the demos, at Capsaicin. pinnacle of the listing is accelerating what VR developers call “motion to photon” — decreasing the lag among when you flow your head and the show catches up. faster reaction now not most effective makes for a more-realistic VR enjoy, however is a key issue in reducing the motion illness triggered in lots of humans by means of laggy VR offerings. The hassle is that now not only does a VR experience want to be generating frames at 90fps for easy movement, it wishes to provide two of them at a time (one for every eye). So, rather the extra-traditional 60fps goal for most video games, the GPU and CPU want to be churning out 180 frames each 2d — with a lag of less than 15 milliseconds to get to the candy spot of responsiveness.

AMD has innovated in a number of regions to assist developers acquire this purpose. LiquidVR is their call for a set of competencies that it's miles making to be had with its latest GPU services. especially, LiquidVR gives help for Asynchronous Shaders (allowing more parallelization of processing), multi-GPU assist, and late Latch (for async replace, permitting faster response to sensors). below the covers, LiquidVR also implements Direct-to-show rendering to supported VR gadgets, bypassing the OS for lower latency.

Of direction, greater green software is handiest a part of the answer for builders. AMD additionally showcased its massively-powerful new twin GPU pictures accelerator — the new Radeon seasoned Duo (that we covered one after the other) — and demoed its Polaris 10 and Polaris 11 subsequent-generation GPUs. The Polaris 10 turned into proven going for walks Hitman and Battlefront in fairly-convincing style. i was able to demo a passively cooled Polaris 11 jogging a VR video on an Oculus DK2, which worked nicely given the restricted ambitions. AMD is hoping the passive cooling functionality will allow it to set up the Polaris 11 in some new situations, like theaters or different shared venues, that haven’t had access to splendid VR playback before. at the greater traditional pix the front, AMD additionally announced that it become providing a free rendering library — hearth Renderer — so as to natively be able to take benefit of the dual GPUs at the hearth pro Duo.

AMD rolls out an all-megastar array of enterprise supporters for its efforts

maximum of the 2-hour-lengthy assertion became taken up with testimonials from industry companions utilising AMD’s new products — for gaming, three-D rendering, and VR. Many were predicted, but there were some interesting programs referred to. for example, with high-give up Cinematic VR, it's been very difficult for administrators to get realtime view of what is being shot due to the large processing requirements. Matthew Lewis, Director of Fox’s newly-introduced murderer’s Creed: VR revel in, said that AMD’s new Radeon seasoned Duo allowed him to preserve up with filming the way he has always desired to.

Cevat Yerlic, of Crytek, took the opportunity to announced that their VR First instructional initiative is now being rolled out at 8 institutions, together with CSU Monterey Bay, Purdue, RIT, USC, and the college of Florida within the US. those faculties gets improvement structures that include AMD seasoned dual hardware.

cube & rectangular Enix are the use of AMD-supported GPUOpen to quick remap functionality onto new hardware. Nathan Griffiths of AP and Sean Liu of 360 Video each explained how the better overall performance made possible with AMD’s LiquidVR and its new GPUs changed into enhancing their workflow and letting them get their journalistic content material posted in a more timely style.

For the ones used to the dominant marketplace proportion of Nvidia inside the computing device GPU market, AMD provided the exciting statistic that 83% of VR structures are powered by using AMD (which of direction includes a large range of consoles). That gives its efforts within the region pretty a chunk of weight among each hardware and software developers. One instance was the advent of execs from each HTC and HP on level to promote their partnerships with AMD in optimizing their users’ enjoy of VR.

Sulon Q and its Magic Beans stole the display

For those who have been impressed by using demo motion pictures from Magic jump or Microsoft’s HoloLens, the demo video from startup Sulon is at the least as impressive. The “Magic Beans” video that was projected on stage was shot thru Sulon Q hardware, and mixed a remarkably sensible augmented truth scene that segued right into a VR enjoy. The object monitoring and alignment of the AR sequence turned into wonderful — which Sulon attributes to processing its ahead-dealing with snap shots in actual time with its proprietary Spatial Processing Unit (like Microsoft and Google, Sulon has realized that custom hardware is wanted for realtime AR). Like so many early AR demos, although, it was shot inside the agency’s office, so we didn’t get to look something happening stay.

Like Microsoft’s HoloLens, the Sulon Q is un-tethered — a big gain. however, the Q is a full-face headset (like the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive), in place of a see-through show. That offers it a better ability to do actual VR, and a much wider subject of view, however does mean that the person’s view of the outside world whilst utilized in an AR mode is furnished absolutely by means of cameras — making the fast processing of digital camera information specially vital. Sulon CEO waved a prototype of the Q around on degree, however in any other case kept it carefully hidden below his jacket, and later below glass, so the simplest glimpse we were given of what it is going to be capable of do changed into 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 capabilities a one hundred ten-diploma FOV on its 2560×1440 show. It has an interface for controlling the windows UI from the device, however we didn’t see that demonstrated. The tool supports DirectX 12 and Vulkan, in addition to integrating AMD’s LiquidVR generation. Rounding out its skills is AstoundSound for 3-d spatial audio, in addition to a couple of noise-canceling microphones. Sulon claims its tool is “coming in Spring,” although we anticipate in an effort to be an early developer version, rather than a complete-on customer launch. either way, it has big ability to be a flagship in this area, as removing the tether, and having a single tool that helps each AR and VR is something of a Holy Grail within the blended-reality marketplace.

The Capsaicin occasion become one more example that GPU carriers recognise that VR (and AR), along side gadget getting to know, represent some of the largest capacity growth regions for his or her companies. It was additionally true to look AMD’s awareness on go-platform answers like Vulkan, as there are a growing range of various structures and markets which might be all worth of funding and interest.