AMD Dual-GPU Radeon Pro Duo Built For LiquidVR Development (Updated)
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.”
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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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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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GPUEnthusiast This is interesting. Marketing to developers of VR is a great way to justify the price. However, the performance to the price isn't necessarily there, though neither was it for the R9 295X2 at 1500 dollars.Reply -
turkey3_scratch What architecture is this based off kcarbotte? I'm not very familiar with non-gaming architectures, but is this Polaris-based, or something else?Reply -
Two Fiji cards slapped together...bottom line overpriced and useless. You can buy two Fury cards and put them in crossfire, it will be cheaper.Reply
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010TheMaster010 Dual Fiji is one board, less latency, one radiator, less power. Not just "Two Fiji cards slapped together"Reply
It's a lot easier to install one of these instead of two Fiji X. Lets not even touch Quadfire. -
Turb0Yoda I'm gonna assume this is liquid cooled... picture has streams of water and there is no visible fan...Reply -
Knicks2012 They should have released this sooner with Polaris and Pascal coming later this year. It doesnt even have a released date, what are they waiting for??Reply -
kcarbotte Reply17661052 said:This is interesting. Marketing to developers of VR is a great way to justify the price. However, the performance to the price isn't necessarily there, though neither was it for the R9 295X2 at 1500 dollars.
That depends on your perspective. An R9 295X2 will outpace an overclocked GTX 980 Ti in games that support CrossFire. Having that kind of power two years ago, and still not having anything on the market yet that you can replace it with, says alot. -
wifiburger wow that's one expensive GPU, on another note ! one should ask them what's their plan on making people wear those stupid VR helmets to play their game ?Reply
nah i'll just wait for Nintendo VR screen edition without VR helmets