AMD has kick-started this year’s Game Developers Conference with its very own webcast called Capsaicin, to show the company’s latest gaming technologies. During the webcast, AMD announced the long-awaited Radeon Pro Duo graphics card, the Sulon Q headset and of course, virtual reality.
During the event, AMD mentioned that it is very serious about virtual reality. VR is here to stay, according to AMD, mainly because of better technologies implemented in today’s VR headsets – like LiquidVR – and a healthy amount of investment by various major companies. According to Jon Peddie Research, AMD products boast an impressive 83% of the total addressable market for VR headsets.
AMD has also introduced the Radeon VR Ready premium program in which the company has provided consumers and developers with a list of its compatible products for VR gaming. GPUOpen and Asynchronous Compute were also talked about during the event. AMD also managed to take a jibe at its “green” competitor by roughly estimating the number of games ruined by GameWorks.
Aside from VR, AMD has also briefly demoed the Polaris 10 GPU. The demo featured the recently released Hitman game, which ran at a solid 60 FPS. Interestingly, according to the GPU roadmap showed by AMD, it seems that HBM2 memory standard may not be used for Polaris GPUs. Knowing this, the only possible memory standard for Polaris GPUs would either be HBM1, GDDR5 or GDDR5X, which is also rumoured be used in Nvidia GP104 Pascal GPUs.
That being said, 2016 seems to be a year to look forward to for AMD and its fans. Especially because there are still two other major products that may be announced later this year the company.
