Caporegime
http://fudzilla.com/news/graphics/37105-amd-works-on-virtual-reality-tooCooperation, not VR headsets
We became aware of a few VR-related things back in mid-2014, and one of them was that both AMD and Nvidia were investing a lot of resources in Virtual Reality.
Nvidia officially mentioned VR Direct back in September 2014 and we saw an Unreal Engine demo powered by Nvidia VR, on the Oculus DK2 VR headset. There are some indications that Nvidia might talk about VR at its Shield event next week.
They are not alone, as some big guys including Oculus by Facebook are working hard on Virtual Reality solutions. Online game distribution pioneer Valve is about to presentt its take on the VR problem, Samsung is using Oculus technology for its Note 4 VR device.
This is not all, as both Sony and Microsoft have their own version of hologlasses, which are going after the Augmented Reality (AR) side of things.
AMD is also working on Virtual Reality, but from what we know AMD is working with Oculus and doesn’t want to make its own devices. This is interesting, since the Crescent by Oculus demo was demoed on Nvidia-powered machines.
We are sure that AMD will talk Virtual Reality at the Games Developers Conference, at least behind closed doors, but as we said before we expect GPU companies will be all over the Virtual Reality space.
Some technologies such as 3D stereoscopic gaming never became mainstream, and we believe that VR will have to go through quite a struggle before it does.
We are certain about one thing - you will need a lot of GPU power to run and render a nice virtual reality environment in high resolution, and 100W – 200W TDP GPUs are going to be way better choice than graphics inside of mobiles or tablet SoC, there is simply no doubt about that.
So, with nVidia and AMD (albeit working with Oculus and not making their own devices), who here is interested in VR? This is something that I want and quite surprised I never grabbed a OR dev kit to try out, as I am a big proponent of 3D.
New news in.
Liquid VR' is AMD's push into virtual reality with software
The latest Silicon Valley company to hop on the virtual reality bandwagon is AMD, this morning unveiling what it's calling "Liquid VR": a software development kit aimed at making VR easier for everyone. The announcement comes from a presentation at GDC 2015 in San Francisco, where virtual reality is dominating the news. What does Liquid VR do for developers and users? It essentially makes everything much easier. As one AMD rep put it during this morning's presentation, "You can plug an Oculus Rift into a computer and start 3D rendering directly to the headset, even without Oculus' SDK." In so many words, Liquid VR is yet another solution for making various VR headsets work easily on various devices; it also optimizes the use of that headset for that particular computer (no doubt powered by AMD's chips).
Liquid VR is AMD's first public step toward VR support, company reps said, with partnerships and more planned for the future. Oculus VR director of engineering Anuj Gosalia says his company is "very excited" about the things AMD is doing in VR, and that Oculus is working on leveraging AMD's work in its own work. For instance, the ability to simply plug in a Rift headset and have it recognized as a VR headset rather than a new monitor.
There are many more, far more complicated ways that the companies are working together, but this is the kind of stuff that will be invisible to most of us -- the kind of stuff that makes VR seamless. The first version of the SDK is available to "select" developers starting today; AMD is looking at this as the Alpha.
When asked about whether or not AMD is also working with HTC and Valve on the HTC Vive headset, AMD reps hilariously clammed up and asked whether or not they could talk about that yet. Sounds like the answer is yes!
Liquid VR' is AMD's push into virtual reality with software
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