AMD Announces LiquidVR SDK (GDC 2015)

[[Coi] Mr.CLuBBeR]

We interview AMD Graphics CTO Raja Koudari about the company's VR initiative

Providing presence inside a virtual reality headset, or trying to make you feel like you are somewhere you aren’t, is a difficult challenge to solve. AMD is trying to help VR headset maker like Oculus VR and other head-mounted display (HMD) manufacturers better solve that issue with its newly announced LiquidVR SDK.
A big VR obstacle in the way of achieving presence pertains to latency. Minimizing motion-to-photon latency, i.e., having the image properly update as you move your head around, is critical to achieving presence. It also helps you not to throw up. Another challenge is that VR can be extremely taxing on hardware. Because VR has to render two separate images for both eyes, this essentially cuts your framerate in half as your system has to render the scene twice. In addition, VR experiences demand a high resolution to avoid screen door effects and a high framerate/refresh rate for user comfort. All of this amounts to a ton of challenges. And with LiquidVR, AMD is aiming to help developers solve latency, comfort, and compatibility issues.

Check out our interview with AMD CTO of Graphics Raja Koudari above.

AMD is pushing four pillars to topple these challenges. The first of which is what the company refers to as “latest data latch.” Essentially what this does is it uses the GPU to provide the HMD the latest possible image data when rendering to the display. When old data is sent to the headset, users get the feeling of judder when the image is outdated.
AMD is calling its next pillar “Async shaders for VR.” This allows for asynchronous time warp and essentially predicts the next pixels to be rendered based on head movement/trajectory. AMD says this will also help minimize latency, stuttering, and judder.
The third pillar pertains to CrossFire. With dual GPU setups (this includes Nvidia cards at the time of this writing), users should expect optimizations for throughput (that is raw power), but dual GPU setups are not currently optimized for latency, which is vital for good VR experiences. As a matter of fact, according to Oculus VR, dual GPU setups currently hurt VR experiences in this regard at the moment. With LiquidVR, not only will AMD cards be optimized for VR, but in a dual-card setup, each GPU can be used to render the feed for each eye.
AMD is calling its fourth pillar, “Direct to Display” rendering. This is a rendering technique that enables direct front buffer rendering to the headset, without having to go through Windows first. It will also be platform agnostic and will be able to work with a variety of HMDs, not just the Oculus Rift.
AMD acknowledges VR has a tough road ahead, but thinks VR is the next frontier of computing and wants to accelerate the process. The company outlined several uses for VR headsets which include: education, medical, big data visualization, training/simulation, entertainment, gaming, virtual-social world, and remote presence.
The company is currently in talks with several HMD manufacturers at the moment, and time will tell if AMD’s tools will help and be adopted or will just be another cog in this ever fragmenting world of VR.
What do you think of AMD’s VR initiative? Let us know in the comments below.


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