Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation
What Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality developers are talking about
AMD’s latest processor may not dominate every aspect of performance, and it isn’t the cheapest around, but its innovative design may be enough to jolt an industry starved for competition back to life.
The post Ryzen proves the PC industry can no longer ignore AMD’s comeback appeared first on Digital Trends.
AMD's Ryzen CPUs are very impressive, but not so much when it comes to gaming. However, that is not the hardware's fault, according to AMD, which claims that when developers optimize their games, we should see big improvements.
The post AMD: Ryzen CPU gaming performance inhibited by lack of optimization appeared first on Digital Trends.
After months of anticipation, AMD has released its first three Ryzen processors. Can the company’s fresh look at architecture beat Intel, or is the underdog forced to continue nipping at the giant’s heels?
The post AMD Ryzen 7 1800X review appeared first on Digital Trends.
Eye-tracking head-mounted display (HMD) virtual reality (VR) device FOVE 0 has been running demonstrations at GDC with their new partners AMD.
The demos are running on MD MultiRes Rendering on Radeon graphics hardware for the first time using foveated rendering. The FOVE 0 with the AMD Radeon has achieved frame rate improvements of almost double and they are reporting baseline GPU improvements of 30% versus standard rendering.
Daryl Sartain, AMD’s Director of VR had this to say; “What FOVE gives us is something we’ve never had before, the ability to know precisely where the user is looking at any moment is a crucial feature that enables us to accurately render high-resolution images where it matters.”
FOVE began as a project to create an eye-tracking VR headset on Kickstarter, which successfully hit its funding goal on July 4th 2015. Since then FOVE has rolled out it’s FOVE 0 development kit version to it’s backers as well at the dev kit being made available from the FOVE website for $599 (USD).
As announced on their website, FOVE have also rolled out some new demos for download. Including CognitiveVR, an eye-tracking analytics demo that tracks eye movement from inside a VR store, allowing detailed analysis of product placement and advertising effectiveness.
Also on the FOVE Demo Launcher platform are several new demos of games available for FOVE, such as Project Falcon, an on-rails shooter; Judgement, a VR story experience where the player is interrogated by a terrorist group; Rainball a deceptively simple puzzle game and Grandma’s Doll, a VR version of children’s game ‘Statues’ with a horror twist.
VRFocus will continue to bring you news on FOVE as it comes in.
AMD had a press conference at GDC to demonstrate their engagement with the gaming community and had some major VR related announcements. AMD has long supported VR through their own Liquid VR technology and have been evangelizing VR for quite some time. So these announcements at their Capsaicin and Cream event made complete sense. GDC is a developer-focused conference so its worth remembering that many of these announcements will not have a direct impact on consumers, but rather an indirect effect as a result of decisions made by developers.
The first major announcement from AMD was that they have worked with Valve to support asynchronous reprojection, which is Valve’s own feature that exists to improve the VR experience and eliminate judder. This feature is akin to Oculus’ asynchronous time warp but for Valve’s Vive platform. The hardware manufacturer will support this feature through a driver update and Valve will support it through an update to SteamVR which is the company’s component of the Steam gaming platform. Valve actually launched this feature back in November along with NVIDIA, but now AMD is bringing support for this feature to their GPUs in March, which is a welcome addition for anyone running an AMD GPU with a Vive.
AMD also added support for a forward rendering path with Unreal Engine 4, which is one of the most popular engines in the world and is commonly used by some of the top game developers in the world. This forward rendering path feature is yet another VR-related feature that improves overall image quality in VR since HMDs are not the same as computer monitors and behave differently. As a result, lots of applications support forward rendering to deliver faster and better looking VR applications. Not all developers necessarily find forward rendering to be their cup of tea, but having support for the option is important for AMD to be relevant in VR.
Last, but not least, AMD announced their biggest partnership of the year and possibly in the company’s history with game developer and publisher Bethesda. This partnership will very likely stretch outwards into areas like VR, which is why it’s such a big deal. After all, Bethesda is releasing Fallout 4 in VR and it sounds like it will very likely ship with Vulkan which is a very good low level API that can squeeze the most performance out of virtually any CPU and GPU combination. However, AMD’s partnership with Bethesda is clearly designed to help them get better support for their GPU and CPU features in games and to accelerate performance in VR and other applications.
AMD did not announce anything regarding their new GPU code named Vega other than the fact that it will commercially be called Vega. Many people have been anticipating AMD’s newest GPUs using the new Vega architecture, but in the meantime, NVIDIA has announced their own GTX 1080 Ti which appears to once again raised the bar for AMD to compete with them
Disclosure: Anshel’s firm, Moor Insights & Strategy, like all research and analyst firms, provides or has provided research, analysis, advising, and/or consulting to many high-tech companies in the industry, including AMD, NVIDIA and others. He does not hold any equity positions with any of the companies cited.
Tagged with: amd, Asynchronous Reprojection, Bethesda, valve
During AMD's Capsaicin & Creme press event, the company revealed the official brand it will use for its upcoming Vega-based graphics cards. AMD also talked about three of the GPU's major features, and its support for virtual reality.
The post AMD’s upcoming Vega-based graphics cards will be called Radeon RX Vega appeared first on Digital Trends.
Announced at AMD’s GDC 2017 press conference, Radeon GPUs will support Asynchronous Reprojection on SteamVR in the next update. The technology helps to maintain smooth head motion when framerate drops below the headset’s refresh rate.
Roy Taylor, Corporate Vice President – Alliances at AMD took to the stage with some passionate announcements about AMD and its VR support, promising ‘120+ fps, billions of entities and 16K graphics’ in the future. Today, their focus is on delivering the most seamless VR experience possible on existing hardware, and a much-needed feature is an effective way of dealing with performance drops. Taylor invited Dan O’Brien, General Manager of HTC Vive, onto the stage to announce Asynchronous Reprojection for Steam VR on Radeon GPUs.
While AMD’s LiquidVR technology has supported Asynchronous Spacewarp on the Oculus Rift since December, Asynchronous Reprojection for SteamVR has been limited to Nvidia GPUs since its introduction in October 2016. The technique is very effective at mitigating the impact of small performance drops below 90fps, maintaining totally smooth head orientation tracking, which can result in a significant improvement to comfort and immersion. AMD is aiming to include the update in the next release of Radeon software.
The post AMD GPUs to Support Asynchronous Reprojection via SteamVR appeared first on Road to VR.
As we wait not-so-patiently for tonight's possible announcement of new GPUs from both Nvidia and AMD, we'll cover the rumors to this point, and talk possible implications on this week's Close to the Metal.
The post Close to the Metal ep 32: Tonight’s the Night for New GPUs appeared first on Digital Trends.
Intel has slashed the prices of a number of its desktop processors ahead of AMD's Ryzen desktop CPU family launch just days away on March 2. The biggest price drop spotted thus far is with the Core i7-6950X, with a $300 cut in price.
The post Intel is slashing CPU prices like a serial killer ahead of AMD’s Ryzen CPU launch appeared first on Digital Trends.
Eye-tracking is a technology that has been around and available for a while on computer screens, tablets and mobile phones, but SensoMotoric Instruments (SMI) have improved the technology and made it available to be integrated into mobile virtual reality (VR) technology.
SMI will be demonstrating their technology using a Samsung Galaxy S7 to show off the benefits of their eye-tracking, including improved visual experience, and lessened power demand on the smartphone via Foveated Rendering. They believe it will address problems that mobile VR experience when it places high demand on the processors in smartphones.
“Eye tracking technology will bring yet another level of sharpness and detail to untethered VR worlds,” said Pablo Fraile, director of ecosystems, mobile compute, ARM. “Our demonstration of SMI mobile eye tracking technology on ARM-based devices highlights how foveated rendering will increase the efficiency of mobile VR experiences without compromising frame rates or visual quality.”
SMI Director OEM Business Christian Villwock had this to say; “Given ARM’s global position as a mobile technology provider we are very pleased with the success of this collaboration, We have long believed that eye tracking is central to the future of all VR,including mobile, and having a company such as ARM align with this view is to us, a vindication of that long-held belief.”
SMI and ARM will be demonstrating their eye-tracking technology at GDC 2017, booth 1924.
For further information on SMI and eye-tracking technology, keep your eyes on VRFocus.