The Virtual Reality World Congress (VRWC) 2016 has kicked off today in Bristol, UK with a keynote note speech from AMD’s Roy Taylor. During which he has revealed that the company is working its own virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display (HMD) alongside other VR-centric technology. One of which is a new upgraded graphics card for its professional users.
Taylor said that the company would be unveiling a new AMD W9100 card which will have 32GB memory onboard at the NAB show next week in Las Vegas, Nevada. The current W9100 has 16GB GDDR5 memory on board to handle 4K resolutions and video editing, with 5.24 TFLOPS peak single-precision floating-point performance.
No further details on the new graphic cards other features or performance were given, but its likely some will be designed to help the company get a foothold on the VR market which it’s strongly involved with.
With VR requiring beefy PC’s to run devices like Oculus Rift and HTC Vive at the minimum specifications, evermore powerful graphics cards are going to be needed to run the latest experiences. Current HMDs have a 1080p screen resolution, but due to the close proximity to customers eyes the pixels can still be seen. 4K resolution would be the next step to improve immersion and cards that can provide this capability to two screens effectively will be an important step.
VRFocus will continue its coverage of AMD, reporting back with any new VR updates.
