PRESS RELEASE
The HTC Vive starts shipping this week, and AMD is ready with software optimizations and features to guarantee users an exceptionally smooth experience in VR from day one. What makes Radeon graphics the definitive solution for your Vive-powered VR experience?
VR-Ready Software
Last week AMD released its WHQL-certified VR-ready driver, Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.3.2, optimized for both the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift and featuring support for the Radeon Pro Duo. You can download the driver here.
AMD has also released a beta driver, Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.3.4, featuring further optimizations for AMD LiquidVR™ features. The beta driver is available here.
AMD LiquidVR™ Technology
AMD's LiquidVR™ technology enables immersive, interactive, and intuitive VR user experiences that seem every bit as real as the physical world, and empowers VR developers and programmers to create world-class VR content, and superior comfort and compatibility.
AMD has worked closely with HTC to implement several LiquidVR features, only available on Radeon GPUs, including:
- AFFINITY MULTI-GPU: VR presents some unique challenges for multi-GPU rendering. The extra frame of latency associated with alternate frame rendering (AFR) is much more noticeable than in non-VR scenarios, and rendering each frame twice (rendering from the viewpoint of each eye) adds CPU overhead that can limit frame rates. Affinity Multi-GPU addresses these challenges by enabling applications to assign tasks to run on specific GPUs. Each GPU can render the viewpoint from a single eye, then composite the outputs into a single stereo 3D image.
- DIRECT-TO-DISPLAY: VR headsets are a new class of display devices that may currently lack native support in existing operating systems. Direct-to-Display is designed to bypass these limitations and create a seamless plug-and-play user experience by enabling head-mounted displays to be treated as special display devices that require no special configuration in the OS.
SteamVR Performance Test
Radeon R9 graphics cards are designed to plug-and-play with the HTC Vive for a seamless, spectacular VR experience and stunning gaming performance. Earlier this year, Valve released the SteamVR Performance Test, one of the first available virtual reality tools to help consumers identify graphics cards ready to power premium virtual reality experiences on the HTC Vive headset. Radeon R9 390, Nano, and Fury series GPUs are all able to achieve ‘VR Recommended’ status.
