AMD Capsaicin Event Showcases VR and GPUOpen

Just yesterday, AMD hosted their Capsaicin live stream event from GDC. While there were some product announcements like the Radeon Pro Duo and the teasing of the upcoming Polaris 10 GPU, most of the time was spent on reiterating past statements. The key to this was VR and AMD spent a lot of the event focusing on this and ragged in a large number of industry insiders to shore up that point. Of course, we also get the usual cringeworthy humour from their engineers.

First off, AMD spoke about their investment in the pixel and HDR. Once again the focus was on improving the information each pixel portrayed to better present the whole image. Of course, AMD also talked about increasing pixel count more and more to get better image quality. The key to this are developments in new APIs such as DX12 and Vulkan as well as AMD’s own solutions in the form of GPUOpen which has been expanded upon with GeometryFX and other additions. One number mentioned was 16, or the 16ms that is allowed for each frame to be computed in order to allow 60FPS.

In order to power these effects, though, AMD is hoping that GPU scaling will continue to improve. This will be due to both improved scaling of multi-GPU (like for the Radeon Pro Duo) due to better support in DX12 and improved process does and architectures. AMD has noted that while GPUs haven’t been keeping track with Moore’s law in terms of performance per dollar, smaller GPUs have and it is important to be able to get 2 smaller GPUs to work together better since that solution would offer better bang for the buck.

In terms of VR, AMD is looking forward to working with developers to get the best performance out of their hardware to get the best experience. In line with this, AMD  is pointing out how their hardware is more than ready for with ACE to allow the best performance under DX12. Combined with LiquidVR and their other software libraries, AMD is presenting a comprehensive solution to allow developers to tackle VR. AMD is also offering a certification program for VR ready systems with their hardware to ensure consumers know that the hardware they are getting can handle VR. With this, maybe VR will go mainstream soon enough.