other games Gaming News: AMD Claims its GPUs are Great at Tackling VR Latency

[Armory Staff]

Looks like Nvidia isn't the only GPU company equipped to take on VR latency

While PC gamers are excited about the release of Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 980 graphics card, it is the Oculus community that is gushing over the GPU. The 980 has become a darling of the VR community with Nvidia’s claims that the new Maxwell-architecture video card will cut latency by up to 50%. It also helps that Oculus VR used the GTX 980 on its systems at its inaugural Oculus Connect event held in September.

 

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Nvidia claims that its GPU technology can potentially reduce latency from 50ms to a much more pleasant 25ms. 

For the uninitiated, latency is a difficult challenge for VR companies like Oculus to solve because too much latency can lead to nausea–inducing head tracking and undesired motion blur, which detract from the experience.

 

While this sounds like a big win for the green team and a missed opportunity for AMD, Oculus VR Software Architect Tom Forsyth told Tom’s Hardware that these technological capabilities were already in AMD graphics cards.

 

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Nvidia has been promoting the VR aspect of its new Maxwell GPUs

When we followed up with AMD to see if it could back up those claims, the company confirmed Forsyth’s assertion and told us, “In comments to Tom’s Hardware made by Oculus VR’s Tom Forsyth, AMD Radeon hardware already supports reduced-latency VR rendering through ‘asynchronous timewarp.’ Asynchronous timewarp can be exposed in AMD Radeon hardware via the Asynchronous Compute Engines (ACE), which can schedule and execute compute and display operations independently of the graphics queue. The ACE is a fundamental architectural building block of AMD Radeon GPUs utilizing the Graphics Core Next architecture.â€

 

While the jury is still out on which graphics-card company will provide the best GPUs for VR moving forward, it sounds like you shouldn’t count out AMD in the latency department just yet. We've got a DK2 on order, so expect more VR-related stories as soon as we get it in!

 

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