The HMD experience is "immersive 3D", at best. Marketing it as "virtual reality" without the capacity of full 3D movement and lacking any haptic, thermal or olfactory interface is rather pretentious anyway. What's next, calling bicycles "virtual limousines"?
finally... sum1 who shares the same opinion as i... LOL..
i remember having an ASUS gforcec 2 GTS with the active shutter glass playing Turok evolution...ages ago; was great, but wasnt a paradigm shift.
Not that im againts VR. any progress made even in the most gimmick of things will eventually make way for better tech. like tht 3D glasses make way for HMDs
but until HMDs trigger another evolution... it is what it is... lacking in the real sense of Virtual Reality....like TRON!
I've tried it, the issue is the resolution and the quality of the video graphics rendering prevents you from really feeling like you immersed. The dreaded screen door effect is there. It'll take awhile until consoles reach that level of horsepower and developers invest resources into it.
I disagree. Games maybe. However some of the videos I have watched on my GearVR have made me lose track of where I actually was. I started doing stupid stuff like reaching for non-existent objects or attempting to walk around the scene. I attempted to talk to someone.
Yeah, the 480 is seriously underpowered for existing VR games compared to Pascal, and that's even before games start supporting SMP. AMD lost a major opportunity when Vega-lite slipped back to 2017.
VR is nothing more than a niche for gamers; and even then its a tough sell. It has great medical and military applications, fps games and simulations that's really it. No one is going to watch a movie at home with a headset on and I struggle to see how (you would need each headset to process its own environment which is cost prohibative) or why (vr eliminates the idea of a shared experience) anyone would want to watch a movie in a theatre with a big headset on. VR isn't portable, the cost to enter is huge and the uptake is slow; its dead on arrival in my opinion.
In another view, movie technologies blossom first in theaters. Videogames blossomed in the arcade industry, which afforded more powerful hardware shared by more users per device than the home computers and consoles of that age.
When you are looking for an experience like relaxing idly while a movie plays, then, yes, those idle VR experiences might be just as easily played with smartphone VR, though a theatre-like or evening-club-like setting might offer the bandwidth to receive the content more inexpensively and quickly than at home, at least for most people who don't live in neighborhoods with fiber to each home. If the experience is a story you can view from outside, then yes, VR does not necessarily enhance the experience of all films. Similarly, most news stories today can be watched on a small screen and don't benefit from a theatre experience.
When you're looking for something more interactive, like currently going to the gym/health club with friends and playing ping pong, or tennis, or basketball, or squash (with goggles), or paintball (with goggles), or scaling a climbing wall (with helmets), then future arcade VR might enable more people to share the same hardware and space than private home set-ups of the early adopters.
Just as many gamer friends today often choose to play an interactive videogame rather than sit passively through a movie, in the future many VRer friends might often choose to explore a new environment together rather than passively watch a documentary tour. This is not to say they never choose the more passive experience, but they have a choice and often choose the more interactive, immersive experience.
you are missing a lot. some examples i can think of at the top of head, travel and tourism, manufacturing, design and architecture, any business functions that require covering a geographic area and save time and resources (inspection, site visits, etc). a lot more that i do not have no idea yet.
I agree Sluze. Its only a couple of years ago that dorky 3D glasses failed miserably to become mainstream. A VR headset is far more intrusive into the user experience. Its a gimmick and you can expect it to have little relevance to gaming in 2 years time
Except modern transportation provides real opportunities over the horse-drawn-carriage of yesterday, something that most every working person would be expected to use to commute to work in this day.
VR headsets? I dunno, man. I don't think the necessity of transportation can be compared to having a close-range screen to your face.
For public space vr to work they will need to deal with the hygiene issue. Arcade games do require the user to touch the common joystick, but washing hands is a lot easier than ridding yourself of the yuck from the sweaty dude who used it before you.
If these experiences are realistically intense then there will be people who sweat etc and frankly I have no interest in going next after that. As Fat Bastard once said, everyone loves their own brand, but someone else's? No thanks. They would need a Balaclava requirement or something like racing helmets, but I fear that could detract from the experience. It will be interesting to see how they address that challenge.
Hmm, that's what I felt too. Too much talk of convincing everyone that AMD is on to the next big things where all they need is just deliver hardware that could scare the hell out of Intel. Yet, it seems that Intel is quite waiting for that scenario to come soon because I don't believe they can't release 10nm this year. They seem to be waiting for the rest of the industry for various reasons.
Whatever you may say 'oh I dont really notice it after 5 minutes', its still there, easily perceptible and kills the immersion.
I guess it'll still be a couple years till displays and GPUs get good enough to feel like you're actually there without the screen-door reminding you you're not.
I haven't used my Gear VR in months after the first few times because of this very reason.
AMD, all bark and no bite, as usual. HARDOCP has been publishing a series of VR benchmarks, and out of the more than half a dozen VR games and demos tested so far, AMD hasn't had smooth sailing through a single one of them. Consequently, the Fury X and RX 480 are planted rather firmly at the bottom of the VR leaderboards by a large deficit, right below the TX(Pascal), 1080, 980Ti, 1070 and the 1060.
I'm yet to get it why wearing a big hulky helmet on your head makes it a greater experience for games at least. To me gaming is mostly about relaxation, in certain cases about competition, don't see how wearing a big, heavy helmet on my head helps with that!
Especially at prices like $300 to $500 I don't see why anyone would want one, why spend so much on stupid helmet, when you can purchase a better GPU and game at 4k resolutions at 60fps?
Well, my experience of vr is From ww1 fly simulator and it definitely was a worth of it! It is really different when you can look around in your plane, look up and down trying to see where the enemy plane is. The difference is huge! So there definitely is room for vr in the games. It does not hurt to have better screen, better gpu and so on, but the the next step is there.
too bad that shooters require you to walk around so a new set of issues is created.
In an airplane or tank simulator you're seated anyway so the VR headset can be tethered too. And even then it's just a way to replace full cockpit imitations with screens instead of windows used by the military with something accessible by the mass market.
"- >If VR was that capable and that ubiquitous, I'm out of a job covering press events....!"
LOL! Your job is safe. As I said in another post, few of us mere 'consumers' have your buttocksian stamina to sit and endure the marketing drivel at these 'press' events.
If the tech industry could deliver 1000 Tflop virtual presence at nominal cost, the last place I'd want to spend my precious virtual moments is at one of these dog and drivel shows.
While I like to discover new tech, prefer to read about it in one of your reviews, Ian. At a safe distance, non-immersive distance. ;-)
I really and truly hope that VR never catches on with the people. It's another gimmick that wants to mess with our minds and our lives. Why to wear a helmet and imagine you are doing a specific thing when you are not actually doing it? I think there is a very dangerous side of things in adopting VR, like many other technologies today, that in a way or another try to invade your life. Just look at what facebook is doing. Do you really feel that you are closer to other people, that your relationship is enhaced? Because the way that I see it is that we reached a point when people choose to sit behind a screen and "socialize", instead of meeting actual people and living the real life. I think, VR will have the same sort of impact, even though the advertised uses now are noble and good for the world. I admit it, technology can be good for all of us, if it used in a good case-scenario, like medical or automotive (and I refer here at the safety technology, not at 20 inch infortainment systems which, in true fairness might actually get you in an accident). In conclusion, I hope that VR will only reach the markets where is really useful, not in people's homes. Cheers
They did not exactly get off guard. ASYNC is barely used in less then 1% of games so even if they perform slightly better on AMD hardware (which they do not, but in AMD defence here they do not have a high end chip to compare to Nvidias high end for an apple to apple comparison) it is not enough right now to make a real difference.
It was a general keynote about the industry, not a product launch. If they kept saying on and on about how great AMD products were ad nauseum, people would have switched off
I'm a Big Picture person. This presentation by AMD is all about setting the VR stage in a Big Picture kind of way.
To me, the whole point of VR is the ability to EXPERIENCE situations and scenarios that are OUTSIDE OF ORDINARY without a huge investment in equipment or training time.
I mean, how many people will ever get to experience WHAT IT'S LIKE to do something extraordinary, like climb Mt. Everest or command a Mission to Mars, in actual reality? Damn few of us!
Ask yourself, why are movies so popular? The answer is, to participate in something out of the ordinary, and to share the experience with other people, inspiring your imagination, fantasies, dreams, and ambitions. That's why action, adventure, and science fiction movies inspire Cosplay events, for example. But even then, only a few thousand people actually invest the time and money required to fully participate.
Few people ever get to pilot a jet fighter in reality. VR can put you in the cockpit much more easily, complete with helmet!
So far, VR is pretty much limited to audio-visual experiences, and the degree of immersion may leave something to be desired.
But I guarantee that, even if you can't smell or taste the air coming from the rubber hose attached to your helmet, the essence of BEING THERE is largely intact, despite quibbles about "screen door" effects spoiling the illusion with current-generation mainstream VR gear.
Well, you have to start somewhere. Black & White silent movies are a far cry from Avatar in IMAX 3D. But that itself is a far cry from what VR can become.
Above all else, Market Size is the key driver of R&D in both VR technology and content.
AMD correctly emphasizes that getting a "good enough" VR vehicle into the hands of the millions with modest budgets is a far more profitable (in every sense) venture than selling state-of-the-art tech to the wealthy "1%". Also, it's vital to create an audience for VR content before studios will invest their time, talent, and money in creating VR Masterpieces for that audience to experience. Not watch, EXPERIENCE!!!
I, for one, share and applaud AMD for their Vision of the Future. VR is indeed the next step up in the Evolution of Entertainment. I want to be in the position of So Many Adventures, So Little Time.
As to cost, look how much people are willing to spend on a Smartphone or Cosplay! How much more do they would spend for an escape from depressing reality, into exciting Virtual Reality?
I would agree if AMD cards where actually good at VR right now which they are not. The 480 which is being touted as VR for the people has very poor performance. Nothing will kill the potential of VR faster than a subpar experiance.
Slandering the performance of the RX 480 as VERY poor is hardly just or fair. I'm fairly sure that most people would consider its performance as "decent" at the very least, especially for the money.
By your standards, I guess 8K @ 240 fps PER EYE would be grudgingly acknowledged as "barely adequate", with a sniff of disdain.
So much this. VR is already dead on arrival as far as tech fads are concerned. Consumers have very little use for it at this point and though a small number of people think they need it right now, they'll rapidly begin to realize the pointlessness of it soon enough (or get distracted by the next "big thing" in tech). VR headsets are this decade's latest high cost shelf-bound dust collectors that'll sit next to tablets, netbooks, and early 90s-era VFX headsets for those that tried it once and realized it wasn't going anywhere.
Oh and AMD, on your "Photorealism in VR" slide. Yeah the 1990s called. They want their "photorealism" buzzword back and are offering "multimedia" in exchange. Kthx.
I don't think VR is pointless, but they may not get the sales they seem to anticipate by comparing it to smartphones.
I created a bunch of scientific demos using the polarised-glasses 3D monitor technology that was popular somewhere around 2012. That sort of 3D seems to have turned into a fad and faded from most places except cinemas now - although you can still buy the monitors in a few places. Anyway, for that specific use case, the experience was GOOD. It was shared (unlike current VR implementations) because many people could gather around the big 3D monitor. However, I did notice there wasn't a lot of other good content besides 3D films - even games were slow to adopt a stereo 3D mode. Sometimes there were these graphics driver hacks that tried to force games to be stereo but worked unreliably.
That 3D fad was probably killed by several things: there were two incompatible systems (scanline interleave and time-interleave, the latter of which required really expensive glasses); it wasn't particularly easy to interface to either of these via OpenGL, say; and due to the aforementioned incompatibility and bad programmer API issues, there wasn't much content. And then without content it fails. Oh, and there's the "Google Glass" reason for failure: anything that requires wearing something on your face looks a bit dorky, so it'll never be "ubiquitous" like watching screens or phones. Although you could argue staring at a smartphone looks a bit silly too.
First, that graph: AMD casually insists that phone+mobile sales will be three times higher and increase three times faster than desktop ever did? Maybe with China and other nations coming along for this ride, and places heavily subsidized by phone companies, but this seems impossible. Also AMD had at least 10% of the desktop sales (volume, not revenue) expect AMD to have at best 10% of Intel's *volume* cut). The whole laughable notion of AMD influencing the course of VR has been dominating the comments, but that last slide is a joke.
VR? Really? Is AMD going to ship a VR-capable GPU in the next two years or so (and will AMD continue to exist that long)? Have they made crossfire work well with VR? My understanding is that a 480 can basically run an Occulus or Vive at ~45fps: not good enough. There might be ways around this, but it looks like that only nvidia will have *any* customers interested in such things, and developers are unlikely to notice any tricks the AMD drivers contain. I hope AMD is ready (and nvidia willing) to license any VR tech when AMD gets around to designing a VR-ready GPU.
This is a real problem. There are a whole lot of "throw more transistors at it" solutions in graphics, that simply won't work with the needed resolution and framerate for VR. New concepts will have to be built up from scratch (the nvidia "tiling" solution can be made to do wonders if they can connect to the LCD at sufficiently low levels), but unless AMD can be part of it while it develops, I can't see them producing a "me to" product during the next GPU generation (which will presumably take wildly longer because of .14nm).
There is one exception to "nobody will do VR on AMD", and that is the PS4 (which seems to be the darling of VR pre-orders). The big gotcha is that the PS4 uses GCN 1.0, and presumably none of the so-called "AMD VR-ready" functions. If AMD is going to get anywhere with VR, they need to build a GCN-based platform on a PS4 (I doubt they have the money. Partnering with Sony in a way that lets them take anything with them back to the PC sounds difficult).
VR is DOA. Anybody remember just how long it took to get 3d graphics (now called GPUs) into PCs? In the early 90s, there were the occasional accelerators that did Gouraud shading, but never seemed to have software support. In 1995, we *finally* got texture mapping graphics cards (the NV1 and videoblaster) which both promptly flopped. It wasn't until voodoo did it's magic a few years later (at prices similar to current VR headsets, never mind the cost of the GPU that drives them) that things barely started moving. It still took another year or two for the voodoo2 to come down to ~$300 prices, eventually morph into the voodoo3 (which didn't require an additional 2d graphics card) and competition from the TNT/TNT2 really get the ball rolling. I can't imagine what would happen if people assumed that the whole thing was make or break with the NV1. People who've used the headsets are impressed, but there is still a long way to go (and if you aren't blazing the trail AMD, you are going to pay to get back on it).
Fanboy notes. I refuse to fanboy any company still in business (been burned way back when I was young). Hopefully I won't be an AMD fanboy anytime soon.
VR is AMD's attempt at product differentiation. NV isn't talking much about it because they're probably in a better position to realize how little impact VR will have in a year or two after the current fad is dead. AMD's only option is to pick at the carcass of excitement over the walking dead of VR/AR/whatever-else-marketing-people-call-it-R while they can to pull in enough sales to keep the company limping along until they can pull a rabbit out of their hat/gain the favor of a miracle granting deity/take advantage of competitor missteps/etc.
Can you imagine that also Sony wants to get into the PC desktop and laptop markets... which are thousands of times bigger than the markets they control right now? Who in his right mind will spend thousands of dollars for a VR set? on the other hand... 3.6 billion people are on the net the potential for VR on PC is huge imagine everyone pays 100 dollars and we get 360 billion dollars in return..
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xype - Saturday, September 3, 2016 - link
VR, so hot right now!nathanddrews - Saturday, September 3, 2016 - link
VR.Assimilator87 - Saturday, September 3, 2016 - link
All these advancements in VR is great but I sure wish it was supplemented by Audio that's True to real world environments.Meteor2 - Saturday, September 3, 2016 - link
Have a look at the BBC's Binaural stuff.at80eighty - Monday, September 5, 2016 - link
They do ; TrueAudio exists, just hasn't been picked up for popular use yetSaolDan - Saturday, September 3, 2016 - link
VR.Ian Cutress - Saturday, September 3, 2016 - link
We should stop calling it 'vee arr' and just call it 'vrrr'. It's the future.know of fence - Saturday, September 3, 2016 - link
It's wee Arr, as in "VR the 99 percent".Pork@III - Monday, September 5, 2016 - link
It's wee Arr, as in "VR the 99 cent". :DD. Lister - Sunday, September 4, 2016 - link
The HMD experience is "immersive 3D", at best. Marketing it as "virtual reality" without the capacity of full 3D movement and lacking any haptic, thermal or olfactory interface is rather pretentious anyway. What's next, calling bicycles "virtual limousines"?Ace2009 - Tuesday, September 6, 2016 - link
finally... sum1 who shares the same opinion as i...LOL..
i remember having an ASUS gforcec 2 GTS with the active shutter glass playing Turok evolution...ages ago; was great, but wasnt a paradigm shift.
Not that im againts VR. any progress made even in the most gimmick of things will eventually make way for better tech. like tht 3D glasses make way for HMDs
but until HMDs trigger another evolution... it is what it is... lacking in the real sense of Virtual Reality....like TRON!
nandnandnand - Sunday, September 4, 2016 - link
Enter your vroom for vrrr.webdoctors - Saturday, September 3, 2016 - link
VR VR VR~!I've tried it, the issue is the resolution and the quality of the video graphics rendering prevents you from really feeling like you immersed. The dreaded screen door effect is there. It'll take awhile until consoles reach that level of horsepower and developers invest resources into it.
eek2121 - Saturday, September 3, 2016 - link
I disagree. Games maybe. However some of the videos I have watched on my GearVR have made me lose track of where I actually was. I started doing stupid stuff like reaching for non-existent objects or attempting to walk around the scene. I attempted to talk to someone.Meteor2 - Saturday, September 3, 2016 - link
...which is AMD's point, and where they're throwing their resources, to resolve those issues.bill.rookard - Saturday, September 3, 2016 - link
Well, they have the GPU for the VR, they just need to get their Zen CPU out the door sooner rather than later.Touche - Sunday, September 4, 2016 - link
Do they?http://www.hardocp.com/images/articles/1472664250c...
Voldenuit - Monday, September 5, 2016 - link
Yeah, the 480 is seriously underpowered for existing VR games compared to Pascal, and that's even before games start supporting SMP. AMD lost a major opportunity when Vega-lite slipped back to 2017.Valantar - Saturday, September 3, 2016 - link
Perhaps a bit off topic, but why is the "VR Guy" in the 5th slide wearing a scarf and a knit cap? This makes very little sense to me.Gc - Saturday, September 3, 2016 - link
Perhaps he's trying to feel immersed in an experience with cold weather. Doesn't dressing appropriately for an experience enhance the immersion?Sluze - Saturday, September 3, 2016 - link
VR is nothing more than a niche for gamers; and even then its a tough sell. It has great medical and military applications, fps games and simulations that's really it. No one is going to watch a movie at home with a headset on and I struggle to see how (you would need each headset to process its own environment which is cost prohibative) or why (vr eliminates the idea of a shared experience) anyone would want to watch a movie in a theatre with a big headset on. VR isn't portable, the cost to enter is huge and the uptake is slow; its dead on arrival in my opinion.Gc - Saturday, September 3, 2016 - link
In another view, movie technologies blossom first in theaters. Videogames blossomed in the arcade industry, which afforded more powerful hardware shared by more users per device than the home computers and consoles of that age.When you are looking for an experience like relaxing idly while a movie plays, then, yes, those idle VR experiences might be just as easily played with smartphone VR, though a theatre-like or evening-club-like setting might offer the bandwidth to receive the content more inexpensively and quickly than at home, at least for most people who don't live in neighborhoods with fiber to each home. If the experience is a story you can view from outside, then yes, VR does not necessarily enhance the experience of all films. Similarly, most news stories today can be watched on a small screen and don't benefit from a theatre experience.
When you're looking for something more interactive, like currently going to the gym/health club with friends and playing ping pong, or tennis, or basketball, or squash (with goggles), or paintball (with goggles), or scaling a climbing wall (with helmets), then future arcade VR might enable more people to share the same hardware and space than private home set-ups of the early adopters.
Just as many gamer friends today often choose to play an interactive videogame rather than sit passively through a movie, in the future many VRer friends might often choose to explore a new environment together rather than passively watch a documentary tour. This is not to say they never choose the more passive experience, but they have a choice and often choose the more interactive, immersive experience.
domeng - Saturday, September 3, 2016 - link
you are missing a lot. some examples i can think of at the top of head, travel and tourism, manufacturing, design and architecture, any business functions that require covering a geographic area and save time and resources (inspection, site visits, etc). a lot more that i do not have no idea yet.Outlander_04 - Sunday, September 4, 2016 - link
I agree Sluze. Its only a couple of years ago that dorky 3D glasses failed miserably to become mainstream. A VR headset is far more intrusive into the user experience. Its a gimmick and you can expect it to have little relevance to gaming in 2 years timeMrSpadge - Monday, September 5, 2016 - link
Sounds like you would have said aprpoximately the same thing about the first cars and planes.JoeyJoJo123 - Tuesday, September 6, 2016 - link
Except modern transportation provides real opportunities over the horse-drawn-carriage of yesterday, something that most every working person would be expected to use to commute to work in this day.VR headsets? I dunno, man. I don't think the necessity of transportation can be compared to having a close-range screen to your face.
fanofanand - Saturday, September 3, 2016 - link
For public space vr to work they will need to deal with the hygiene issue. Arcade games do require the user to touch the common joystick, but washing hands is a lot easier than ridding yourself of the yuck from the sweaty dude who used it before you.If these experiences are realistically intense then there will be people who sweat etc and frankly I have no interest in going next after that. As Fat Bastard once said, everyone loves their own brand, but someone else's? No thanks. They would need a Balaclava requirement or something like racing helmets, but I fear that could detract from the experience. It will be interesting to see how they address that challenge.
Sejong - Saturday, September 3, 2016 - link
AMD talks a lot.zodiacfml - Sunday, September 4, 2016 - link
Hmm, that's what I felt too. Too much talk of convincing everyone that AMD is on to the next big things where all they need is just deliver hardware that could scare the hell out of Intel.Yet, it seems that Intel is quite waiting for that scenario to come soon because I don't believe they can't release 10nm this year. They seem to be waiting for the rest of the industry for various reasons.
Ian Cutress - Sunday, September 4, 2016 - link
It was an IFA keynote about the industry and AMD's part in it, rather than a set of announcements or products.milkywayer - Saturday, September 3, 2016 - link
The Screen Door effect currently kills VR for me.Whatever you may say 'oh I dont really notice it after 5 minutes', its still there, easily perceptible and kills the immersion.
I guess it'll still be a couple years till displays and GPUs get good enough to feel like you're actually there without the screen-door reminding you you're not.
I haven't used my Gear VR in months after the first few times because of this very reason.
D. Lister - Sunday, September 4, 2016 - link
AMD, all bark and no bite, as usual. HARDOCP has been publishing a series of VR benchmarks, and out of the more than half a dozen VR games and demos tested so far, AMD hasn't had smooth sailing through a single one of them. Consequently, the Fury X and RX 480 are planted rather firmly at the bottom of the VR leaderboards by a large deficit, right below the TX(Pascal), 1080, 980Ti, 1070 and the 1060.slickr - Sunday, September 4, 2016 - link
I'm yet to get it why wearing a big hulky helmet on your head makes it a greater experience for games at least. To me gaming is mostly about relaxation, in certain cases about competition, don't see how wearing a big, heavy helmet on my head helps with that!Especially at prices like $300 to $500 I don't see why anyone would want one, why spend so much on stupid helmet, when you can purchase a better GPU and game at 4k resolutions at 60fps?
haukionkannel - Sunday, September 4, 2016 - link
Well, my experience of vr is From ww1 fly simulator and it definitely was a worth of it! It is really different when you can look around in your plane, look up and down trying to see where the enemy plane is. The difference is huge! So there definitely is room for vr in the games.It does not hurt to have better screen, better gpu and so on, but the the next step is there.
Michael Bay - Monday, September 5, 2016 - link
Flightsims were always a domain for that, with this TrackIR thing and crazies building functional cockpits.But mass adoption lies with the shooter.
Murloc - Tuesday, September 6, 2016 - link
too bad that shooters require you to walk around so a new set of issues is created.In an airplane or tank simulator you're seated anyway so the VR headset can be tethered too. And even then it's just a way to replace full cockpit imitations with screens instead of windows used by the military with something accessible by the mass market.
ClockHound - Sunday, September 4, 2016 - link
"- >If VR was that capable and that ubiquitous, I'm out of a job covering press events....!"LOL! Your job is safe. As I said in another post, few of us mere 'consumers' have your buttocksian stamina to sit and endure the marketing drivel at these 'press' events.
If the tech industry could deliver 1000 Tflop virtual presence at nominal cost, the last place I'd want to spend my precious virtual moments is at one of these dog and drivel shows.
While I like to discover new tech, prefer to read about it in one of your reviews, Ian. At a safe distance, non-immersive distance. ;-)
smilingcrow - Sunday, September 4, 2016 - link
'In Berlin next week, AMD is getting an Award about Green Computing'Not for their CPUs and GPUs I imagine!
yeeeeman - Sunday, September 4, 2016 - link
I really and truly hope that VR never catches on with the people. It's another gimmick that wants to mess with our minds and our lives. Why to wear a helmet and imagine you are doing a specific thing when you are not actually doing it? I think there is a very dangerous side of things in adopting VR, like many other technologies today, that in a way or another try to invade your life.Just look at what facebook is doing. Do you really feel that you are closer to other people, that your relationship is enhaced? Because the way that I see it is that we reached a point when people choose to sit behind a screen and "socialize", instead of meeting actual people and living the real life. I think, VR will have the same sort of impact, even though the advertised uses now are noble and good for the world. I admit it, technology can be good for all of us, if it used in a good case-scenario, like medical or automotive (and I refer here at the safety technology, not at 20 inch infortainment systems which, in true fairness might actually get you in an accident).
In conclusion, I hope that VR will only reach the markets where is really useful, not in people's homes. Cheers
3ogdy - Sunday, September 4, 2016 - link
So far it looked like Mark PapuhMastah was more in debt , ratha than makin' papuh.fanofanand - Tuesday, September 6, 2016 - link
I think you are looking for wccftech, that's a different site.Michael Bay - Monday, September 5, 2016 - link
I thought AMD could do without adopting leftist meme bullshit about muh 1% at least.jimjamjamie - Monday, September 5, 2016 - link
Started to lose interest at 'VRaaS'. That is the pinnacle of bandwagon-riding buzzword-spamming waffle.MrSpadge - Monday, September 5, 2016 - link
"Four years ago, AMD saw where the industry was going and invested in high performance compute"Too bad for them nVidia started this more than 10 years ago.
fanofanand - Tuesday, September 6, 2016 - link
Then why did Nvidia get so caught off guard with async?Presbytier - Tuesday, September 6, 2016 - link
They did not exactly get off guard. ASYNC is barely used in less then 1% of games so even if they perform slightly better on AMD hardware (which they do not, but in AMD defence here they do not have a high end chip to compare to Nvidias high end for an apple to apple comparison) it is not enough right now to make a real difference.SeleniumGlow - Monday, September 5, 2016 - link
This is where VR today :Pmelgross - Monday, September 5, 2016 - link
Man, what a waste of time. Very little was specifically said about products. Most of it was diddling.All I can think of when it comes to AMD these days is; BS, BS, BS.
Ian Cutress - Monday, September 5, 2016 - link
It was a general keynote about the industry, not a product launch. If they kept saying on and on about how great AMD products were ad nauseum, people would have switched offTheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, September 6, 2016 - link
but that is basically what they did. Talk about the future and how AMD is part of it.Not sure what is more boring, government or business.
Dr.Neale - Monday, September 5, 2016 - link
I'm a Big Picture person. This presentation by AMD is all about setting the VR stage in a Big Picture kind of way.To me, the whole point of VR is the ability to EXPERIENCE situations and scenarios that are OUTSIDE OF ORDINARY without a huge investment in equipment or training time.
I mean, how many people will ever get to experience WHAT IT'S LIKE to do something extraordinary, like climb Mt. Everest or command a Mission to Mars, in actual reality? Damn few of us!
Ask yourself, why are movies so popular? The answer is, to participate in something out of the ordinary, and to share the experience with other people, inspiring your imagination, fantasies, dreams, and ambitions. That's why action, adventure, and science fiction movies inspire Cosplay events, for example. But even then, only a few thousand people actually invest the time and money required to fully participate.
Few people ever get to pilot a jet fighter in reality. VR can put you in the cockpit much more easily, complete with helmet!
So far, VR is pretty much limited to audio-visual experiences, and the degree of immersion may leave something to be desired.
But I guarantee that, even if you can't smell or taste the air coming from the rubber hose attached to your helmet, the essence of BEING THERE is largely intact, despite quibbles about "screen door" effects spoiling the illusion with current-generation mainstream VR gear.
Well, you have to start somewhere. Black & White silent movies are a far cry from Avatar in IMAX 3D. But that itself is a far cry from what VR can become.
Above all else, Market Size is the key driver of R&D in both VR technology and content.
AMD correctly emphasizes that getting a "good enough" VR vehicle into the hands of the millions with modest budgets is a far more profitable (in every sense) venture than selling state-of-the-art tech to the wealthy "1%". Also, it's vital to create an audience for VR content before studios will invest their time, talent, and money in creating VR Masterpieces for that audience to experience. Not watch, EXPERIENCE!!!
I, for one, share and applaud AMD for their Vision of the Future. VR is indeed the next step up in the Evolution of Entertainment. I want to be in the position of So Many Adventures, So Little Time.
As to cost, look how much people are willing to spend on a Smartphone or Cosplay! How much more do they would spend for an escape from depressing reality, into exciting Virtual Reality?
MrSpadge - Monday, September 5, 2016 - link
One of the best, or maybe the best comment in this thread.Meteor2 - Tuesday, September 6, 2016 - link
Yep, sums the future of VR up perfectly.Presbytier - Tuesday, September 6, 2016 - link
I would agree if AMD cards where actually good at VR right now which they are not. The 480 which is being touted as VR for the people has very poor performance. Nothing will kill the potential of VR faster than a subpar experiance.Dr.Neale - Wednesday, September 7, 2016 - link
Slandering the performance of the RX 480 as VERY poor is hardly just or fair. I'm fairly sure that most people would consider its performance as "decent" at the very least, especially for the money.By your standards, I guess 8K @ 240 fps PER EYE would be grudgingly acknowledged as "barely adequate", with a sniff of disdain.
Boo Hoo, Poor You!
BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, September 6, 2016 - link
So much this. VR is already dead on arrival as far as tech fads are concerned. Consumers have very little use for it at this point and though a small number of people think they need it right now, they'll rapidly begin to realize the pointlessness of it soon enough (or get distracted by the next "big thing" in tech). VR headsets are this decade's latest high cost shelf-bound dust collectors that'll sit next to tablets, netbooks, and early 90s-era VFX headsets for those that tried it once and realized it wasn't going anywhere.Oh and AMD, on your "Photorealism in VR" slide. Yeah the 1990s called. They want their "photorealism" buzzword back and are offering "multimedia" in exchange. Kthx.
stephenbrooks - Tuesday, September 6, 2016 - link
I don't think VR is pointless, but they may not get the sales they seem to anticipate by comparing it to smartphones.I created a bunch of scientific demos using the polarised-glasses 3D monitor technology that was popular somewhere around 2012. That sort of 3D seems to have turned into a fad and faded from most places except cinemas now - although you can still buy the monitors in a few places. Anyway, for that specific use case, the experience was GOOD. It was shared (unlike current VR implementations) because many people could gather around the big 3D monitor. However, I did notice there wasn't a lot of other good content besides 3D films - even games were slow to adopt a stereo 3D mode. Sometimes there were these graphics driver hacks that tried to force games to be stereo but worked unreliably.
That 3D fad was probably killed by several things: there were two incompatible systems (scanline interleave and time-interleave, the latter of which required really expensive glasses); it wasn't particularly easy to interface to either of these via OpenGL, say; and due to the aforementioned incompatibility and bad programmer API issues, there wasn't much content. And then without content it fails. Oh, and there's the "Google Glass" reason for failure: anything that requires wearing something on your face looks a bit dorky, so it'll never be "ubiquitous" like watching screens or phones. Although you could argue staring at a smartphone looks a bit silly too.
wumpus - Tuesday, September 6, 2016 - link
First, that graph: AMD casually insists that phone+mobile sales will be three times higher and increase three times faster than desktop ever did? Maybe with China and other nations coming along for this ride, and places heavily subsidized by phone companies, but this seems impossible. Also AMD had at least 10% of the desktop sales (volume, not revenue) expect AMD to have at best 10% of Intel's *volume* cut). The whole laughable notion of AMD influencing the course of VR has been dominating the comments, but that last slide is a joke.VR? Really? Is AMD going to ship a VR-capable GPU in the next two years or so (and will AMD continue to exist that long)? Have they made crossfire work well with VR? My understanding is that a 480 can basically run an Occulus or Vive at ~45fps: not good enough. There might be ways around this, but it looks like that only nvidia will have *any* customers interested in such things, and developers are unlikely to notice any tricks the AMD drivers contain. I hope AMD is ready (and nvidia willing) to license any VR tech when AMD gets around to designing a VR-ready GPU.
This is a real problem. There are a whole lot of "throw more transistors at it" solutions in graphics, that simply won't work with the needed resolution and framerate for VR. New concepts will have to be built up from scratch (the nvidia "tiling" solution can be made to do wonders if they can connect to the LCD at sufficiently low levels), but unless AMD can be part of it while it develops, I can't see them producing a "me to" product during the next GPU generation (which will presumably take wildly longer because of .14nm).
There is one exception to "nobody will do VR on AMD", and that is the PS4 (which seems to be the darling of VR pre-orders). The big gotcha is that the PS4 uses GCN 1.0, and presumably none of the so-called "AMD VR-ready" functions. If AMD is going to get anywhere with VR, they need to build a GCN-based platform on a PS4 (I doubt they have the money. Partnering with Sony in a way that lets them take anything with them back to the PC sounds difficult).
VR is DOA. Anybody remember just how long it took to get 3d graphics (now called GPUs) into PCs? In the early 90s, there were the occasional accelerators that did Gouraud shading, but never seemed to have software support. In 1995, we *finally* got texture mapping graphics cards (the NV1 and videoblaster) which both promptly flopped. It wasn't until voodoo did it's magic a few years later (at prices similar to current VR headsets, never mind the cost of the GPU that drives them) that things barely started moving. It still took another year or two for the voodoo2 to come down to ~$300 prices, eventually morph into the voodoo3 (which didn't require an additional 2d graphics card) and competition from the TNT/TNT2 really get the ball rolling. I can't imagine what would happen if people assumed that the whole thing was make or break with the NV1. People who've used the headsets are impressed, but there is still a long way to go (and if you aren't blazing the trail AMD, you are going to pay to get back on it).
Fanboy notes. I refuse to fanboy any company still in business (been burned way back when I was young). Hopefully I won't be an AMD fanboy anytime soon.
BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, September 6, 2016 - link
VR is AMD's attempt at product differentiation. NV isn't talking much about it because they're probably in a better position to realize how little impact VR will have in a year or two after the current fad is dead. AMD's only option is to pick at the carcass of excitement over the walking dead of VR/AR/whatever-else-marketing-people-call-it-R while they can to pull in enough sales to keep the company limping along until they can pull a rabbit out of their hat/gain the favor of a miracle granting deity/take advantage of competitor missteps/etc.Ozymankos - Monday, September 12, 2016 - link
Can you imagine that also Sony wants to get into the PC desktop and laptop markets...which are thousands of times bigger than the markets they control right now?
Who in his right mind will spend thousands of dollars for a VR set?
on the other hand...
3.6 billion people are on the net
the potential for VR on PC is huge
imagine everyone pays 100 dollars and we get 360 billion dollars in return..
littlebitstrouds - Tuesday, September 6, 2016 - link
"07:22AM EDT - >I find it interesting Mark is saying MR (mixed reality), which seemed like an Intel term. Sounds like AMD is adopting it readily"MR or Mixed Reality is an industry term, there's nothing exclusive to Intel about it. It's been around for a while.
Romulous - Wednesday, October 5, 2016 - link
Polygons are obsolete. Euclideon has the next tech already working.