Yesterday AMD announced the Radeon Pro Duo water-cooled card, which is a dual-GPU with 16 TFLOPS of single-precision performance that’s based on the Fiji architecture and will sell for $1499. Tom’s Hardware reports that it “combines two Fiji GPUs, 8GB of High Bandwidth Memory, and four display ports.”
The Radeon Pro Duo implements asynchronous compute which is enabled by DX12, and early benchmarks by ExtremeTech have shown that AMD’s Fury X with the Fiji architecture outperformed the Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti in the Ashes of the Singularity, which is the first released game that takes advantage of the new asynchronous compute API within DX12. Anandtech found similar benchmark results when testing both DX11 and DX12.
I attended AMD’s GDC press conference yesterday and had a chance to catch up with Roy Taylor, who is the Corporate Vice President Alliances and Content and in charge of a lot of their VR initiatives. He talked to me about a number of AMD’s VR announcements including their new Radeon Pro Duo GPU, teased game engine integrations yet to be announced, a VR experience based upon the Assassin’s Creed movie coming out by 20th Fox, their VR Ready Premium program, Liquid VR being released onto GitHub, and some updates on the Vulcan API & GPU Open on Github.
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Roy sees that the Radeon Pro Duo will be a great GPU for VR filmmakers who have to stitch 360-degree video content, but also for VR content creators. Roy said that the game engines will be creating tools that are specific for exporting cinematic VR experiences, and we’re likely to hear more about this today and tomorrow as Unity and Epic Games make their GDC-specific announcements.
Roy also said that the Radeon Pro Duo will be the perfect GPU to be able to use Envelop VR’s EVE, which is an operating system for people to work completely within VR.
Each GPU on the dual-GPU Radeon Pro Duo will also be able to drive a single eye using Liquid VR, and I’d expect to see this new card be used for high-end VR experiences as well. There haven’t been a lot more details released about the specs for Radeon Pro Duo yet, but stay tuned this week as we’re likely to hear more announcements about how the game engines may be using this new capabilities — especially considering that Epic Games’ Tim Sweeney was at Samsung Unpacked event showing off how they’ve been integrating the Vulkan API to drive real-time graphics on a mobile phone that look amazing.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:11.977] Roy Taylor: My name is Roy Taylor. I'm the Corporate Vice President of Alliances at AMD, which means I'm responsible for everything which is neither a customer nor a supplier. So I have a team which supports game developers, publishers, and of course VR.
[00:00:24.709] Kent Bye: Great, so right here we're at GDC and there's a couple of new announcements that came out today. So what are you announcing from AMD today?
[00:00:31.791] Roy Taylor: Yeah, we announced a lot. We announced Radeon Pro Duo. It's a new graphics card, has two GPUs, and it's been specifically designed with VR content creators in mind. So it's the perfect product for people who want to do video stitching, for stitching GoPro rigs, joint VR and so on. It's also the perfect GPU product for doing game engine development work. So we announced Radeon Pro Duo, a completely brand new class of product and a new graphics card. We also announced a new program so that people can identify high-end premium rigs for VR featuring AMD technology. So we announced a program called VR Ready Premium and that goes live in the next 24 hours. So those are two things. We also announced today our partnership with 20th Century Fox for the VR experience for Assassin's Creed. And we also announced, not VR, but we're going to be partnering with Creators of Assembly for Warhammer. But watch this space. And a whole bunch of other things to boot.
[00:01:31.161] Kent Bye: So let's go back to the new GPU that was just announced. And having two GPUs, is that kind of like similar to tying two GPUs together, like rendering one for each eye? Is this mainly for developers or is this also for consumers to actually drive higher-end VR experiences?
[00:01:47.150] Roy Taylor: Yeah, actually it's for both. So you can use two GPUs. We also, another announcement we had today was that we have 3D Studio being accelerated scaling through using two GPUs. When you put two GPUs together, you can get much more performance than just one. You can do this GPU per eye, which we have in LiquidVR. LiquidVR, by the way, is available with source code on GitHub, and it's already been downloaded thousands of times. So any of your listeners who want to experiment should go try that. LiquidVR supports the use of those two GPUs. So in answer to your question, we believe that Radeon Pro Duo will be attractive to content creators and power users who want the best and fastest, most powerful rig.
[00:02:27.538] Kent Bye: And so for developers, do you imagine something like these GPUs would be perhaps used for pre-rendering different scenes that are going to be maybe cinematic or passive experience that aren't highly dynamic and allow them to render them faster?
[00:02:40.549] Roy Taylor: Yes, absolutely. In fact, we know that the game engine companies are looking at producing tools specifically for content creators in VR that would allow them to overcome some of the hurdles around using game engines today. Game engines, for example, are not traditionally good at lighting for, say, film directors because they want to have lighting which is per scene or per shot, whereas game engines traditionally support global illumination. Also, game engines are designed for you to run and jump and leap about, whereas a film director wants a particular camera angle or what we call determinism. This product's been designed for these new tools which are coming. Another tool which is coming along is called EVE from a Seattle-based company called Envelope. They realize that the process of creating VR where you have to put the headset on, make some code, take the headset off, make some code, it's very laborious. So their product EVE is designed so you can keep the headset on by using a forward-facing camera to see your hands and your keyboard. And Radeon Pro Duo is a perfect complement to EVE.
[00:03:43.199] Kent Bye: And so with AMD, you've had Mantle, which then became the Vulkan API. So maybe talk a bit about the trajectory from how you started with that API, and how it involved into this open standard, and what the implications of that, now that it's spreading out, and what that's going to enable people to do.
[00:04:00.266] Roy Taylor: Yeah, we think that the success in VR will be a rising tide that floats all boats. And so we should work with all of the ecosystem to help make VR a success. So when we produced Mantle, we promised from the get-go that we would actually put the code out into the world so people could take advantage of it. What Mantle was designed to do, it has done perfectly. And that is to really look at an API, which once upon a time, many, many years ago, was a small piece of software, and had over the years become larger and larger and larger, and realized that the API shouldn't be work, it should help you. So we produced Mantle, which is a low-level API, helped you get nearer to the metal, worked with Kronos to get it into Vulkan, and now our work will continue. We have some other innovations coming, I nearly revealed one just then, hence the hesitation. We have some other things coming along, but our central promise is this, whatever we do, just as we promised with Mantle, we will make available to everybody. And as I said, we have a complete commitment with GPUOpen, GPOpen is an entire platform of software to help developers, all available on GitHub, all available with source code.
[00:05:08.643] Kent Bye: At the Samsung Unpacked event, Tim Sweeney was there talking about a game that they were running on a mobile phone using the Vulkan API. So what are some of the implications of using Vulkan that's going to be able to drive experiences on mobile?
[00:05:22.387] Roy Taylor: Well, Vulkan as a version of OpenGL is platform agnostic. So DirectX 12 is wonderful, and as you've heard today, we're huge fans of DirectX 12, but it's restricted to Windows 10. Now that's not the problem many people thought it would be, because Windows 10 is on 350 million PCs. However, if you want to have an API which spans many platforms, then Vulkan as OpenGL can help you do that.
[00:05:47.795] Kent Bye: DirectX 12 was coming up a lot during the conference day. What are some of the things or integrations that you're excited that AMD is doing with DirectX 12?
[00:05:56.072] Roy Taylor: Well, the biggest is asynchronous compute. You know, we were very, very lucky that we had a GPU architect, a guy called Mike Mentor, some years ago, looked to the future with very, very farsighted vision, said that we're going to want to use the GPU in different ways through different functions. But when you use the GPU to use different functions, you don't want to create a queuing problem. So you don't want to, for example, do physics, stop, do render, stop, access memory. What you want to be able to do is do multiple things at the same time. To enable that to happen, he created the asynchronous compute engine. DirectX 12 takes full advantage of that. The reason it's important is not just because we can deliver more performance, but because we can deliver the kind of performance that allows storytellers not to have to be inhibited, not to have to worry about whether the game or the experience or the hardware can deliver on what he wants to tell.
[00:06:49.611] Kent Bye: You know, I've heard someone tell me, you know, with the rendering and the amount of processing speed that you have from the graphics cards and GPUs, that it's kind of exceeding Moore's Law right now. When you look at the kind of growth of how much better each additional year or 18 months is bringing with improvements in GPUs, how do you kind of think about that or quantify that relative to Moore's Law charts of the doubling?
[00:07:11.847] Roy Taylor: Well, I'm incredibly excited. What we need to do is incredible. So let me take a second to pause here and share something with you. The current headsets require 90 frames a second at around 1080p, 2K per eye, and around 10 milliseconds of latency. That performance is around 8 teraflops. But where we're going to is a place where we have 16k per eye at 144 frames a second with zero latency. Well, I think our calculations came out that's 743 teraflops or 81 times more performance than we have now. So we have a lot to do until the job is done in terms of HMDs.
[00:07:51.785] Kent Bye: Right, so how long do you think it's going to take there? What rate do you think that things are kind of doubling until we get to that point?
[00:07:57.770] Roy Taylor: Well, it's interesting. Traditionally, ourselves and our competitor launch one major new GPU a year. If that continues on the current trajectory, it means that we won't get to 16k per eye for 81 years. In which case, you as a young man will be around. Fortunately, I probably won't be here to see it. How do you get that 81 years? or just on the basis of a new GPU per year, and the iterations that we have. Of course, I don't think that will happen, because you're quite right, Moore's Law has been exceeded, and we're gonna get there long before.
[00:08:28.757] Kent Bye: Yeah, that's what I mean, I expect it way before 81 years, if there's increases in innovation that continues to have to happen in order to drive that, exponentially, that could be in an order of 5 to 10 years.
[00:08:38.925] Roy Taylor: Oh of course, I was saying 81 years for, you know, just for some fun. No, I think that in the same way that Mike Mantle had the idea for Asynchronous Compute, of course innovation will continue and that will break the traditional scaling that we've had. So it's impossible to say, I couldn't say, but I believe if you look at the amount of talent which is going into VR right now and the investment in VR, as I just said when I was on stage, you can clearly see that we're going to fix these things much faster than we thought.
[00:09:06.892] Kent Bye: And so one of the other things that was shown today was that there was a new HMD that was being shown. What is AMD's connection to the AR, VR, HMD that was being shown today?
[00:09:17.157] Roy Taylor: So I think you're referring to the Sulon headset. It's not an AMD headset, it's Sulon, it's a Canadian company. And they use one of our APUs to power the headset. So an APU is a processor which contains both the CPU and the GPU in a single package. They took a look at the work we've done in the console area and decided to use that technology for their headset.
[00:09:37.209] Kent Bye: Great. And for you, what kind of experiences are you really looking forward to experiencing in VR?
[00:09:42.653] Roy Taylor: Oh, that's a great question. There's a lot. I recently tried Paranormal Activity by VRWorks. It scared me to death. You know, in fact, there's a video of me playing with this thing and I'm actually telling myself, it's not real, it's not real. But it felt real, it was actually kind of scary. So I'm a big fan of the horror genre. But I think the other thing I'm really excited about is being able to go somewhere and be somewhere I couldn't otherwise. You know, I'm probably never going to climb Everest, so I love the Everest experience. I'm interested in things like that. Take me somewhere I can't go or I'll never experience. Or give me a unique perspective. Show me what life is like in a completely different way. For example, what it's like to be a VR dog. I have no idea. That might be fun. I know it's bizarre, but it might be fun. A colleague of mine said, well, what about if you could relive those dreams? What would that be like? So, you know, I can't give you a simple answer, straightforward answer to that because I'm seeing so much content. I want to try it all.
[00:10:38.648] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you see as kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:10:45.344] Roy Taylor: I think the most important thing about it is its transformative nature. I'll show you a personal story. My parents came to Los Angeles, where I live, and I took them to Universal, and I didn't take them to what I thought they were going to do, which is go on the rides. We had a VR set up there at one of the meeting rooms. And I kind of tricked my dad a little bit, because his attitude of being, oh, VR is terrible, it's a fad, it's going to make me sick, whatever. So I got to try VR out. My dad absolutely loved it. But my mom actually had an emotional experience. She said to me, I can be young again. In VR, I'm not old. In VR, I'm energetic and I can do things like I was young again. And I suddenly, I thought, oh my God, that's really profound. That's a real insight. VR will be transformative. Everybody will be beautiful. Everybody will be handsome. Everybody will have boundless energy. And I think that's kind of exciting.
[00:11:45.642] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say?
[00:11:49.635] Roy Taylor: Yes, if you're listening to this and you have an idea and you want to get support for your idea, the fact is we haven't yet found, we're not yet working with the next Sergey or Larry. Somewhere out there, hopefully listening to your podcast, has a brilliant idea and he's thinking, if only somebody could help me. Please come to AMD. We can't respond to everybody, but we're going to really, really try, because we know that somewhere in your audience, one of your listeners has a breakthrough idea or product. In fact, there's a guy here you should meet, young film director I met, just like that. Very talented guy called Kevin Cornish, and he produced the first piece of VR content using the gaze direction of the headset. together with camera core assets using a Canon 4Ti and a game engine to produce something called Believe VR. It's completely original. It's absolutely fantastic. And actually, when you finish with me, I'm going to take you right over to introduce you to him.
[00:12:48.638] Kent Bye: OK, great. Well, thank you so much. Thank you.
[00:12:50.519] Roy Taylor: Thank you.
[00:12:51.819] Kent Bye: And thank you for listening. If you'd like to support the Voices of VR podcast, then please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash Voices of VR.
