AMD Announces Long Term Strategic Relationship with Bethesda
AMD today announced a long term strategic partnership with Bethesda, a major game publisher ("The Elder Scrolls" series, "Doom," and "Dishonored," etc.). This, according to AMD's Raja Koduri, will see Bethesda optimize its entire library of games (at least the recent ones), for AMD Ryzen 8-core processors, and the upcoming Radeon "Vega" GPU architecture. The first product of this new partnership will be the 2017 release of "Prey," the hotly anticipated survival-horror game.
AMD's Raja Koduri and RX 480 Multi-GPU - 100% Scaling On Sniper Elite 4
At GDC's AMD Capsaicin Event, AMD's Raja Koduri reaffirmed Radeon's commitment to Multi-GPU setups by remembering his RX 480 launch event claim on a RX 480 dual setup beating their competition's high-end solutions. Then, Rebellion's Chris Kingsley took stage, who attributed the fact that his team was able to get Sniper Elite 4 to run with 100% scaling on a RX 480 dual GPU setup to Rebellion's previous work with Mantle. Next to it, for perspective, AMD showed a dual-GPU RX 480 system running the same game and settings at virtually double the frame rate - a perfect, 100% scaling. Rebellion's Chris Kingsley also elaborated on the importance of DX 12 and Vulkan on making such a thing even possible in the first place, reiterating the software and coding investment necessary to make that happen.
AMD Unveils VR Asynchronous Reprojection and Forward Rendering Tech
AMD at its Capsaicin & Cream event unveiled a new VR technology, called asynchronous reprojection, in partnership with HTC, makers of the HTC Vive VR HMD, and Valve, promoters of SteamVR. The company also unveiled forward-rendering a technology that makes the GPU predict and render ahead of user input, to cushion performance drops. Watch this space for more.
AMD and LiquidSky Intro GeForce Now-rivaling Game Rendering Service
AMD introduced a remote rendering service rivaling
NVIDIA GeForce Now, which it developed in partnership with LiquidSky, a company which will operate the service using AMD Radeon "Vega" based remote GPUs, that can stream to a variety of devices including low-power notebooks, tablets, and handhelds. The company will launch the service at prices competitive with GeForce Now. Watch this space for more.
What sets LiquidSky apart from GeForce Now is its pricing. The basic plan is ad-supported, and is hence practically free, with a pay-as-you-go plan starting at $4.99, and monthly plans starting at $9.99.
AMD's Vega HBCC Tech to Halve Memory Requirements
AMD at its Capsaicin & Cream event announced that the High Bandwidth Cache controller, a feature introduced by its "Vega" GPU architecture to improve memory management, increases game performance tangibly. The company did a side-by-side comparison between two sessions of "Deus Ex: Human Revolution," in which the machine with High Bandwidth Cache gained minimum frame-rates by up to 100% (double), and average frame-rates by up to 50%. To obtain these results, AMD also throttled GPU memory amounts down to 2 GB. This should benefit implementations of "Vega" with lower amounts of video memory.
AMD Names Radeon "Vega" Product Line as Simply Radeon RX Vega
AMD's hottest announcement from its Capsaicin & Cream event is the brand unveil for consumer graphics products based on the "Vega" architecture. The lineup will be called simply Radeon RX Vega (likely with brand extensions to denote tiers and model numbers). The company also unveiled the "V" (for Vega) logo we've sen from CEO Lisa Su's presser from last week. The product unveil video illustrates how "Vega" will span across the consumer-graphics, pro-graphics, and Radeon Instinct data-center GPU lines.