AMD Radeon Pro Duo Dual Fiji GPU Now Available, Built For VR
In March of this year, AMD revealed the Radeon Pro Duo, a dual Fiji GPU graphics card with 8GB of HBM memory and capable of delivering up to 16 teraflops of compute performance. The company had said that the card would be released in Q2 2016, and today it is available for purchase.
AMD said the Radeon Pro Duo is meant for VR content creation of all varieties, including game development, VR journalism and medical research and more. The company said the card was designed for heavy workloads that come with VR content creation and that the Radeon Pro Duo’s compute performance will help “bring tomorrow’s VR content to market in record time.”
“With the Radeon Pro Duo, it’s our objective to solve major problems developers face, by reducing latency and accelerating the VR pipeline through close collaboration with the content development community and with AMD LiquidVR technology,” said AMD in its press materials.
AMD is pushing the Radeon Pro Duo as a solution for VR content creation, but there’s nothing stopping you (except maybe the price) from using it as a top-end graphics solution for gaming. The card features two liquid-cooled Fiji GPUs, each paired with 4GB of HBM memory, and AMD said it has support for DX12. (We would love to show you performance numbers, but we haven't received a sample to test. An AMD representative told Tom's Hardware that the company has decided not to send samples to enthusiast sites for independent testing.)
The Radeon Pro Duo will sell for the not-insignificant sum of $1,499. AMD said it is available today worldwide, from select partners. Every Radeon Pro Duo graphics card comes bundled with the Liquid VR SDK to help developers and content creators to coax the most performance out of their creations.
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Kevin Carbotte is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware who primarily covers VR and AR hardware. He has been writing for us for more than four years.
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ohim ReplyWe have the new single-most powerful gaming graphics card ever available now. Cool!
it still has 2 chips in it .. so it will hit brick walls when coming to CF support ... -
ahnilated If they aren't putting it out for independent testing then it sounds to me like it sucks. If you have a great product you want everyone to know. If you have a crappy product you want no one to know until you have sold as many as possible.Reply -
SirGCal Good Grief, this is not a gaming card. It is a software and development card. Meaning for use with various CAD, rendering, etc. engines. Not Gaming...Reply -
SoundFX09 ReplyIf they aren't putting it out for independent testing then it sounds to me like it sucks. If you have a great product you want everyone to know. If you have a crappy product you want no one to know until you have sold as many as possible.
Or Maybe AMD's Learned from their Mistakes with the Nano, and isn't going to send review samples to specific reviewers.
Still, I'd rather wait until we have benchmark results showing up from reviewers before making any conclusions on the Pro Duo.
Also, I agree that $1,500 is too much of an asking price for AMD. The Titan X from Nvidia is $1,000, and if It can't even beat a 980ti, AMD will only be digging further down. I expect price drops over the next couple of months, similar to what happened with the 295X2.
Until then, I suggest waiting out for now.
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CarbonK I don't really see a point to this. Maybe if you've got a SFF ITX build with that one PCI-E 16x slot, or an MATX build with other PCIE devices already in use.Reply
But other than that, what's stopping you from getting a fairly cheap Crossfire-capable MATX motherboard and two R9 Nanos? Two Nanos are $1000 for both, leaving $500 for watercooling if you want it.
I guess you could build a four way Crossfire PC with only two 16x slots, but that's just madness. Other than size limitations, I see no reason to get one, as cool as it may look in my system.