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#414: AMD’s SIGGRAPH & VRLA Announcements: New GPUS, Open Source Tools, & Consumer VR Pods

August 7, 2016by kentbye

Roy-TaylorAMD has made a number of different announcements over the past couple of weeks at both SIGGRAPH and VRLA. They announced some new Radeon Pro graphics cards designed for professional visual effects creators, as well an open source VR video stitching software called Project Loom (to be released on GPUOpen later this summer), as well as rebranding and open sourcing their ray tracing program ProRender, which is a rebrand of FireRenderer.

At VRLA, AMD announced that they’re going to be brining VR demos to the masses in public spaces like malls and movie theaters in partnership with Awesome Rocketship. In order for VR to be successful, then AMD is helping to support initiatives to make more accessible for consumers to demo. AMD also announced the least expensive VR-ready PC that meets Vive’s and Oculus’ minimum specifications with the CYBERPOWERPC Gamer Xtreme VR for $720 now available on Amazon.

I had a chance to catch up with AMD’s Roy Taylor, VP of Alliances, Content, and VR, at VRLA to hear more about AMD’s recent announcements, their open source philosophy, their support for VR storytellers, and the upcoming VR on the Lot event on October 13 & 14th that will be helping to educate the film industry about VR.

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Radeon Pro is being sold to visual effects professions and VR storytellers

Here’s a teaser trailer for the Awesome Rocketship VR demo pods that AMD will be helping to bring to malls, movie theaters, and other public areas where people gather.

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[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. My name is Kent Bye, and welcome to The Voices of VR Podcast. Over the last couple of weeks, there have been a couple of conferences that I've been able to attend. One was SIGGRAPH, as well as VRLA. So at both conferences, AMD was there making a number of different announcements. First, they announced some new graphics cards for graphics professionals. They also announced some other open source tools for video stitching, as well as ProRender. And at VRLA, they've been announcing a lot of different initiatives to really bring VR to the masses. So they're going to be starting to have virtual reality pods and different movie theaters and malls around the country with their partnership with Awesome Rocketship. And they also have quite a number of different collaborations that they're doing with storytellers and a lot of their initiatives with supporting within the next year up to 500 different projects. And so I have a chance to talk to Roy Taylor, who's the Vice President of Alliances, Content and VR for AMD, about a lot of these different initiatives, their open source philosophy, as well as a little bit more information about the upcoming VR on the Lot event, which is going to be an opportunity for a lot of people within Hollywood to learn a lot more about what's happening in VR. So that's what we'll be covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. But first, a quick word from our sponsors. Today's episode is brought to you by The Virtual Reality Company. VRC is at the intersection of technology and entertainment, creating interactive storytelling experiences. The thing that's unique about VRC is that they have strategic partnerships with companies like Dbox, which is a haptic chair that takes immersion and presence to the next level. So they're making these digital out-of-home experiences for movies, studios, and original content. For more information, check out thevrcompany.com. Today's episode is also brought to you by The VR Society, which is a new organization made up of major Hollywood studios. The intention is to do consumer research, content production seminars, as well as give away awards to VR professionals. They're going to be hosting a big conference in the fall in Los Angeles to share ideas, experiences, and challenges with other VR professionals. To get more information, check out thevrsociety.com. So this interview with Roy Taylor happened at VRLA, happening at the LA Convention Center on Saturday, August 6th. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.

[00:02:35.843] Roy Taylor: My name is Roy Taylor. I'm Corporate Vice President of Alliances, Content and VR for AMD. And I'm here at VRLA. The event is just getting bigger and bigger and better and better for all things VR.

[00:02:48.352] Kent Bye: Right, so I was also at SIGGRAPH and saw you speak there, and you had some announcements both at SIGGRAPH and here at VRLA within the last couple of weeks. Maybe you could just give some of those highlights of things that were new that you're announcing.

[00:02:59.398] Roy Taylor: Absolutely. At SIGGRAPH, we announced a number of new products. We announced three new workstation graphics cards called Radeon Pro, which are for creators, whether you're in CAD or if you're in media and entertainment. Terrific new products with great performance at wonderful new price points. Probably more interesting to your listeners might be the fact that we also broke ground with new products, the type of which we'd never done before. The first of those was a rendering software solution. Renderers are used to make really wonderful, wonderful art. Until now they've been an almost exclusive domain of high-end architecture and movies, but recently they started to be used in every kind of content creation. Well, most renderers work on CPUs if the datasets are very large. They run on GPUs if the datasets are smaller. We announced a renderer which will work on both CPUs and GPUs. Not only that, but they'll work on our competitors' CPUs on Intel. They'll work on our competitors' GPUs, NVIDIA. And the render is available as source code on GitHub with no restriction, which means if you're a young, talented filmmaker or content creator and you don't want to spend money on lawyers over contracts and license agreements, you can just get going. It's there. It's available. We also announced something called Loom, which is a real-time 360 stitching solution for up to 24 cameras running up to 8K resolution. And we did that because stitching, you know, is one of the big problems to solve. If you create really good stitching in 360 VR, you can't see the stitching and you concentrate on the experience. So we're really, really pleased to announce Saloom as well. And then, to show you how busy we've been, we also announced a product called Radeon Pro SSG. I mentioned just now about large datasets. So what we did was we put a terabyte of SSD onto the graphics card. This will allow you to do some really, really incredible things because we bypassed the PCI bus. So we demonstrated Radeon Pro SSG running 8K RAW at 93 frames a second. Nobody's ever seen anything like that. This is a 500% improvement over anything which could be done until now. So that was SIGGRAPH. So that was pretty busy. Then we came here to VRLA and we talked about the fact that for VR to take off, we need to create an environment where more people can experience it. The headsets are shipping, which is great, but for VR to really fulfill its promise, it needs to be accessible by not tens of millions, but hundreds and even billions of people. You know, more than three billion people will go to the movies this year. So we announced our partnership with a company called Awesome Rocket Ship. which are going to put VR pods in places where the public goes, movie theater lobbies, shopping malls, any kind of large event of any kind where people gather, so that if you've not tried VR before, you'll be able to, and you'll be able to at a very reasonable price of 5 bucks, 10 bucks a ticket. So we announced that together with them. And then we also announced a partner with a company called Rendition to use a renderer and a 360 stitching. And we also announced that a very talented 360 filmmaker here called Lucas Wilson will also be using our new tools for his next two movie projects.

[00:06:08.048] Kent Bye: Yeah, one of the big takeaways that I got from your SIGGRAPH presentation was that you're doing a lot of collaborations with creatives and content creators within both the film and entertainment industry, as well as perhaps bringing in some gaming people, but mostly kind of narrative and storytelling. And so maybe you could talk about that initiative for a lot of partnerships and collaborations that you're doing.

[00:06:26.457] Roy Taylor: Yeah, it's true. This year we touched 160 different projects. For next year we're going to be probably supporting as many as 500. And the reason we do this is because obviously we want our wonderful new tools to be used, but more than that we want to enable storytellers to work out how to use these tools to change and expand and extend the storytelling narrative. There are many, many things that people would love to do but don't realize that tools exist. So we want to show people, but more than just say, look, our stuff is great. It runs at 400 million miles an hour, et cetera. By actually embracing real-world projects, we can show examples. That helps us show off our technology, but it also rewards and says thank you to the content community by allowing us to show what they've done. So it works really, really well.

[00:07:15.734] Kent Bye: Nice. And at AMD, it seems like there's another thread of open source ethics, of really making these tools available and not holding on to the proprietary nature of it, but actually enabling a lot of open standards as well as a lot of new open source technologies that you're promoting. So maybe you could talk a bit about that in terms of your philosophy, but also what that is actually enabling.

[00:07:37.515] Roy Taylor: Yeah, you know, I'm glad you mentioned about our philosophy. We don't think that our competitor is a bad guy because they want to make things proprietary. That's their business decision. They're entitled to do that. And there are some successful proprietary platforms in the world today. The reason, however, we have a different philosophy is this. We think that there's an opportunity for VR to become truly a trillion dollar industry that has billions of people using it. But for that to happen, we have to, have to, have to create compelling, fantastic content so that those people want to use it. And we're impatient. We don't want that to take 20 years or 30 years. We want it to happen as fast as it can. So a philosophical commitment towards putting everything out as open source, to make everything we have available without restriction, is really our commitment to accelerating the pace of ramp, accelerating how fast this industry takes off. And so that's why we're not doing anything proprietary. In the future that might change but we don't think so. We think this is the right way to go, the right thing to do.

[00:08:43.058] Kent Bye: And here at VRLA I noticed that you're a big sponsor here and I'm just curious if you could kind of reflect on the previous ones and kind of the evolution that you've seen being involved in this specific expo here.

[00:08:54.506] Roy Taylor: Yeah, you know, I can remember, it really wasn't very long ago, a little less than two years ago, I got a phone call saying, you've got to meet Cosmo Schaff. I'm like, Cosmo? So I met Cosmo and he told me about what the guys were doing, him and Johnny and James and John and Jessica and Adam. And so I went along to their first meeting, it was a Reddit meetup group. There were a hundred people in a car park, I mean literally in a car park. But they were so enthusiastic and they were just so much fun to be around. They're like, I want to help these guys. I just really, really do. So I said, let's help them. Let's just see where this goes. It's local to me. I can jump in the car and come down the road. And so we did that and the next one got bigger and then the next one got bigger. And I, you know, kept saying to them, well, we'll give you more money. You should keep, this is a good thing. And it's grown. It's unbelievable. And of course, you know, they're not just guys that, you know, we do business with a trade show. They're our friends. We've grown up together. You know, they know me. I know them. And we care about them very much. They're great guys. And I think the reason they made the event a success is that they've never set out to do this for money. It's not about building a business. In fact, most of them have another business with Visionary. But they do it because they love it. And I think that that shines through. So I love VRLA and I love the guys.

[00:10:08.356] Kent Bye: Yeah, and it seems like storytelling within VR is a big open question in terms of how to have the right amount of interactivity. I know that Kevin Cornish is someone that you suggested that I talk to, and I know he's showing a new experience called Remember Remember, but I'm just curious to hear your take on some of the cutting edge of interactivity and storytelling within VR.

[00:10:28.561] Roy Taylor: Yeah, you know, Kevin's a wonderfully gifted guy. We're also working with McKin Scott, John McKins and Remington Scott. They have an experience here called Grace and another experience which actually doesn't have a full title yet. But both of those are extremely, extremely good. And those guys come at this with a wealth of expertise. They worked on Lord of the Rings, for example, and The Watchmen. So we love working at that level, too. We also work closely with Chris Edwards and the team at Third Floor, which is the preeminent previs company here in Hollywood. And we also work with incredibly talented Dan Gregoire, who's the CEO of Matter VR and Halon Studios. And he's worked on every major movie you could imagine. So we want to engage with young, new, raw talent like Kevin, but we're also, I'm very pleased to tell you, working with some of the more experienced content creators. What they have in common, all of them, is all of them want to use this new medium as a new way of telling stories. And I think that's just terrific.

[00:11:26.128] Kent Bye: So one of my sponsors for the Voices of VR podcast for this past month has been the VR Society. So they have a VR on the lot that's coming up. And I'm just curious if you have some comments about this gathering of the tribe of all the big Hollywood studios through this consortium of the VR Society to start to have a professional organization to start to really imbue some of these new interactive technologies into traditional storytelling.

[00:11:49.239] Roy Taylor: Well, caveat, I mean, I should share the fact that I'm actually on the board of governors for the Advanced Imaging Society. Jim Chamberlain, the president, is a personal friend of mine. And so are Mark and Nick, who are putting the On The Lot event together. And AMD is also the platinum sponsor. The reason we're a platinum sponsor is because a lot of the VR which we're seeing produced is what we call VRE. Previously, we called it VRX, or VR Entertainment Experiences. And we feel that this is a medium in its own right. that VR content like The Martian or The Walk or Sleepy Hollow or any of the work from Specular Theory and these guys, it deserves recognition. And so we're very, very excited about it on the lot because it's a dedicated event just for that medium. It will have all the major studios there. It will be on the Paramount lot, October the 13th and 14th. And we have some really, really great surprises coming up in terms of who's going to be there.

[00:12:43.564] Kent Bye: Awesome. And finally, what do you see as kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?

[00:12:49.667] Roy Taylor: I think ultimately it might turn out that Mark Zuckerberg is an absolute genius. And the reason I say that is because of an insight that I got from my mother. My mother is 72 years old and she's been nagging me to get her a VR HTC Vive for Christmas. And my mum, why do you want this? She said, well, in VR, I can be young again. And I suddenly thought, oh, wow. Well, in VR, I want a six pack. I don't have one, by the way. But then I realized, well, OK, it's no good having those things without other people seeing them. So then I started to realize, it might well be the killer app isn't an app at all. It's just the ability for us to be someone else, another version of ourselves, in an alternative universe, or universes. And that made me realize that Ernest Cline really is clever, too, because we're now talking about Oasis. And so I think the future could be Oasis. Awesome. Thank you so much, Roy. Thank you. It's fun talking to you. Appreciate it.

[00:13:47.406] Kent Bye: So that was Roy Taylor. He's the Vice President of Alliances, Content and VR for AMD. So I have a number of different takeaways from this interview. First of all, when I look at the different graphics cards that are out there and available, the big two players in the GPU realm are NVIDIA and AMD. And so there's a number of different benchmark scores to be able to get a sense of the speed and efficiency of each of these cards. And NVIDIA tends to be a little bit higher rated in terms of how fast each of these cards are. However, AMD tends to have a little bit better ratio for the amount of performance you get for the amount of money that you want to spend. So when you're doing the different cost benefit analyses, people who tend to want to get something that's good enough to meet the minimum specs for VR, tend to go with AMD and people who want the absolute fastest cards tend to go with NVIDIA. Another thing that people consider within this is the different approaches that each of these companies have. Now AMD, like Roy was saying, tends to take a much more open source approach with a lot of their technologies. One of the things that they're supporting is this OpenCL, which is the Open Compute Language, which is the general processing GPU. So these are a lot of these applications that are using GPUs in order to do different compute processes. So NVIDIA uses their proprietary format, which is CUDA. On the AMD side, they use the OpenCL, which is the Open Compute Language, which is an open standard that's supported by the Khronos Group. So OpenCL tends to be supported cross-platform across all the different competitors for AMD, so whether that's Intel on the CPU side or with NVIDIA on the GPU side. So AMD has this website called GPUopen where they have a lot of these different projects that are going to be coming out here soon. One of which was the Project Loom which was this video stitching software which is scheduled to be released sometime later this summer. Video stitching within 360 video is that usually you have all these different perspectives in the camera and in order to actually watch it, it has to be stitched together and from what I hear there's still a lot of need to have humans to be able to do this because the AI It can do a decent job in a lot of cases, but I think that humans tend to be a little bit more reliable when it comes to video stitching within 360 video. So there's a number of different other video stitching solutions that are out there, like Color as well as Nuke is something that a lot of people are using within their existing compositing pipeline. And so it'll be interesting to see if this open source project of Project Loom tends to get some traction once it's actually released. They announced it, but it hasn't actually been released yet. The other thing that they announced were a lot of these different graphics cards, which these graphic cards that tend to get announced at SIGGRAPH by both AMD and NVIDIA tend to be more towards the graphics professionals who are using these GPUs to be able to accelerate their processing in terms of rendering out scenes that are going to be used, more static experiences. So I did a little bit more of a deep dive into the different renderers that are out there to try to get a sense of the ecosystem and landscape. And from what I can tell, A lot of the real-time rendering is what VR actually wants and needs. And so the Octane Renderer, which I covered in episode 413 with Otoy's CEO and co-founder Jules Urbach. So the Octane Renderer seems to be something that is a little bit more in real-time. And some of these other renderers take a little bit more to process these scenes offline, but then are able to eventually do the processing to be able to display them to be able to have an immersive environment. For example, I know that NVIDIA was showing IRAE, which was a way to actually go into one of these pre-rendered out scenes with digital light fields. But again, it's very process intensive. In the demo that I showed, it took a long time even just to load it up. Now, with AMD, they have announced previously this renderer called FireRenderer. And they are rebranding it here at SIGGRAPH to ProRenderer. So this is another ray tracer. So it's able to actually trace these light rays and do this physically correct rendering. But again, it takes a lot of time and processing power to actually do that. So I don't think this is something that's going to be necessarily done in real time just yet. But it could potentially be used to render out these digital light field scenes that you can then step into these different immersive VR scenes. Now, I don't know how much you're going to be able to actually navigate and walk around in some of these, because it's multiple perspectives. And as you change your perspective, the ray tracing light rays and everything, I think, is going to actually change a little bit. With NVIDIA's eye ray, there was a demo that I was able to see where I was able to kind of actually walk around a room a little bit more. But with AMD's ProRenderer, there wasn't any demos that were being shown off. And so it sounds like this was being announced at SIGGRAPH, but it hasn't really necessarily been fully released yet. Of all the different processing tools that are out there, I think there may have been one or two plugins that were released so far, with more on the way. So the other thing that I just wanted to bring out about AMD is that they have been super supportive of the VR community in different ways, supporting VRLA, as well as supporting a number of different content creators through either giving them access to hardware or directly financially supporting some of these creative projects. And so they've been able to make it feasible for creatives with a background in storytelling and filmmaking to be able to create experiences. Just like Samsung, I think, has been focusing a lot on storytelling and film within mobile VR, I think AMD tends to be focusing a little bit more really targeting the storytellers within the Hollywood with a lot of their different initiatives and content partnerships that they've been doing. One of which is the VR on the Lot, which AMD is co-sponsoring with the VR Society, which has been a sponsor for the Voices of VR for the past month. And Roy was able to announce the dates now on October 13th and 14th happening at Paramount Studios. So you can go on to VR on the Lot for more information about that. I'm not sure if I'm actually going to be able to make that. The Steam Dev Days is happening on October 12th and 13th within Seattle. And so I'm going to be there. And I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to. make it down to LA after going to Oculus Connect and then this artificial intelligence conference right after that and just kind of like a full 10 days of travel. But if you are in the LA area and within the film industry or looking to do more storytelling, then there's going to be a whole lot of different film executives and people within the film industry at this VR on the Lot event that's going to be happening in mid-October. So check that out at VR on the Lot if you're interested. So that's all that I have for today. If you enjoy the podcast, then please do consider telling your friends as well as leaving a review on iTunes. That really helps with people that are just discovering for the podcast for the first time to give it a listen and a try, especially if there's a lot of different glowing reviews, which there have been so far. So thank you for everybody who's done that so far. And if you'd like to support the Voices of VR podcast, then please consider becoming a donor at patreon.com slash Voices of VR.

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#414: AMD’s SIGGRAPH & VRLA Announcements: New GPUS, Open Source Tools, & Consumer VR Pods