People who take virtual reality seriously will need a powerful computer to produce decent graphics. Although a lot of gamers and enthusiasts swear by NVIDIA GPUs, it looks like AMD may be well worth considering. At least that will be the case in the future, thanks to their Radeon Vega Frontier Edition. Although this card is perfectly suited for VR by the look of things, it is not a gaming-optimized card. A bit of an odd concept, to say the least.
What is the Deal With The New AMD Video Card?
Thinking of a video card that is nearly perfect for virtual reality and not designed for gaming does not seem to mix all that well. A lot of virtual reality enthusiasts play games in VR, thus their card needs to support it. However, the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition should not be written off that easily either. After all, AMD advertises this card as perfect for creative and science pioneers. Not something one would necessarily associate with virtual reality either.
It takes a closer look under the hood to fully understand why this card is so important. Its technical specifications are nothing short of amazing. The Radeon Vega Frontier Edition produces 13 teraflops of peak single-precision 32-bit compute performance. Comparing that number to the top NVIDIA GPUs, there is a 1 and 1.7 teraflops gain by AMD respectively. In this regard, it is the fastest graphics card in existence.
Moreover, the new AMD GPU is capable of providing quick access to huge amounts of data. This will be extremely useful for enterprise customers and companies exploring the boundaries of supercomputing. It is rather strange to hear a new AMD GPU is coming out that is not designed for a gaming audience by any means. Instead, the company wants to cater to enterprise users, which is equally as important.
What makes the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition appealing to VR is how it will be able to provide more realistic and immersive environments. For the people developing and creating VR content, this GPU can be quite a powerful ally. Consumers who want to experience VR from a gaming point of view may want to pass up the opportunity to experiment with this card, though. The new GPU is expected to launch in June of 2017, and we will know more once people have gotten their hands on a review unit.
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