Today AMD is announcing the Radeon Pro Duo which is a dual GPU version of its Fury X Graphics card. AMD’s is promoting Radeon Pro Duo-based systems as VR development platforms. The initial AMD sanctioned version of that VR platform comes in the form a pre-built boutique PC assembled by Maingear. Radeon Pro Duo is aimed at VR developers with the express purpose of offering best technology and hardware for VR. AMD claims that the Radeon Pro Duo has 16 Teraflops of compute performance on tap. This level of compute performance coupled with AMD’s Liquid VR software initiative makes the Radeon Pro Duo into what AMD believes to be the best VR development platform available.
AMD is holding a public live stream of its Capsaicin Event.
The Radeon Pro Duo graphics card is the initial product in a series of VR focused offerings that AMD is planning and certifying for VR usage in OEM offerings as VR Ready Creator line. The goal of the VR Ready Creator line is to offer developers and consumers alike a hardware platform the showcases the best that AMD and its partners have to offer from a hardware and software perspective. Crytek, developer of Crysis and the CryEngine has endorsed the Radeon Pro Duo by selecting it as the hardware platform of choice for its own VR First initiative.
As part of this partnership with Crytek the two have announce that they will be opening VR Labs at universities to seed the next generation of VR developers. AMD also believes that they’re in the lead on the transition to VR gaming with 83% market share of the available VR Ready PCs by their own count.
AMD has announced that the Radeon Pro Duo will launch this quarter alongside the rest of the VR headset ecosystem and will retail for ~$1499.
Based on the images that AMD’s released of its Radeon Pro Duo graphics card we can identify quite a bit of the hardware contained with in it. The Dual Fiji SKU has a closed loop water cooler and requires three eight-pin PCI-E power connectors. Tellingly there’s also a Samsung 850 EVO 250GB SSD, and MSI X99A RAIDER motherboard, a Corsair closed loop CPU cooler, Kingston HyperX DDR4 memory, and what we can only assume is an eight core Intel Extreme Edition CPU.
UPDATE 3/14/2016 @ 4:13 PM: Press release unclear. Confusion resolved.
The Maingear’s Radeon Pro Duo-based PC build is quite handsome and emblazoned with a large Radeon Technologies Group logo. The black and red color scheme is highlighted by white LEDs and a plethora of radiators and fans.
In a rather surprising announcement AMD’s Carrzio APU, specifically the FX-8800P at 35 Watts, is being used in a VR headset from Sulon called the Q and paired with Sulons own spatial processing hardware. Thus in a strange twist of fate the only Carrizo-based PC with a 2560 by 1440 OLED display will go on your head, rather than in your lap. Sulon for its part also highlighted that its spatial processing unit and development platform make uses of the HSA features offered by AMD’s Carrizo.
All in all AMD’s Capsaicin Event is once again reaffirming its commitment to the VR ecosystem and doing what needs to be done court partners, developers, and gamers alike.S|A
Thomas Ryan
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