AMD Radeon Technologies announced the first product in a new line of AMD VR Ready Creator products, the Radeon Pro Duo. The company said this dual-GPU board works hand in hand with the LiquidVR SKD and is capable of delivering as much as 16 TFlops of compute performance.
Raja Koduri, AMD Radeon Technology Group's senior vice president and chief architect, called the Pro Duo a workstation-class card with HBM and asynchronous shaders. It combines two Fiji GPUs, 8GB of HBM, and four display ports.
AMD revealed that Crytek selected the Radeon Pro Duo and LiquidVR SDK as the “platform of choice” for its VR First Initiative that will bring VR-ready development laboratories to universities around the world.
“As a state of the art platform, the AMD Radeon Pro Duo with the LiquidVR SDK is the perfect choice as the graphics standard for Crytek’s VR First initiative,” said Cevat Yerli, CEO, Crytek. “As a graphics card that bridges the needs of both VR content creators and content consumers, it’s extremely fitting hardware to supply to the brightest up-and-coming developers, who will surely shape the future of virtual reality and immersive computing.”
AMD’s Radeon Pro Duo is designed for VR content creators building games, education experiences, medical applications, cinematic experiences and VR journalism. At its announcement event here in San Francisco Monday night at GDC, Matthew Lewis, president of Practical Magic VR announced that 20th Century Fox, Practical Magic and New Regency were creating an Assassin's Creed VR experience (a cinematic experience, not a game), and had been using the Radeon Pro Duo to make the complex project happen.
AMD also said that the Pro Duo is more than capable of high fidelity gaming, and that it has full support for DX12.
“More powerful computing platforms are rapidly leading to greater immersive experiences," said Raja Koduri, senior vice president and chief architect, Radeon Technologies Group, AMD. “This is most evident with VR which demands ever higher compute performance with rock solid consistency. Our new AMD Radeon Pro Duo with our LiquidVR SDK is the world’s fastest platform for both content creation and consumption, enabling a world class graphics and VR experience.”
AMD said the Radeon Pro Duo will be available in Q2 of 2016 and expects to sell the boards for $1,499 USD.
Updated March 14, 10:44pm PT: During the AMD launch event (called Capsaicin) on Monday evening, we learned a few more product details. We also added some information about Assassin's Creed VR experience.
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