AMD’s latest GPU, AMD Fiji, has been announced a while back that it will come with High Bandwidth Memory. Shortly after CES in Las Vegas, Oculus was said to be toying around with the latest AMD hardware and we even saw it in action in the “Showdown running on the Oculus Rift Crescent Bay, being powered by an unannounced Radeon R9 flagship ultra-enthusiast product”. Even Valve and HTC are rumoured to have a Fiji-powered demo, but have yet to confirm or give any sort of detail about it.
However, a few suspicions were raised once AMD has released the news about LiquidVR SDK, where it was clearly stated it needs two GPUs. The slide below also confirms that it needs Affinity multi-GPU rendering in order to reduce latency and increase content quality.
“Affinity Multi-GPU for scalable rendering, a technology that allows multiple GPUs to work together to improve frame rates in VR applications by allowing them to assign work to run on specific GPUs. Each GPU renders the viewpoint from one eye, and then composites the outputs into a single stereo 3D image. With this technology, multi-GPU configurations become ideal for high performance VR rendering, delivering high frame rates for a smoother experience.”
This makes more sense now and it clarifies how AMD got to 8GB of RAM. Nobody thought it would be 4GB times two, meaning two separate GPUs, each with their 4GB of HBM1 memory. Also, AMD confirmed that it is already working on a next generation High Bandwidth Memory HBM card that is smaller than 20nm, but it is no clear just yet what type of note or memory it will use. It could be HBM1 or HBM2.
Thank you Fudzilla for providing us with this information
