AMD's Roy Taylor teases the future of VR: 16K and 120Hz

GDC 2017 - During AMD's recent Capsaicin & Cream, Corporate VP of Alliances Roy Taylor - who beams with excitement and passion every time I see him, provided 3 world exclusives for AMD during Capsaicin & Cream.

His first talk was 'The Key to VR is Immersion' tackled a few of the big problems of VR as Taylor said that the screen door effect of current-gen VR headsets breaks "the spell" of immersion. He said that "we must be entirely in the experience", teasing that AMD and Radeon Technologies Group are working on next-gen graphics and VR relationships which is exciting.

The reason? Roy talked about "making great narratives and VR content brings along some difficult compromises", and touted it as the "rock, paper, scissors" situation. Roy teased that the future of VR is 16K, "billions of entities/objects" at 120FPS. This is absolutely mind boggling, requiring not just next-gen GPUs like Vega, but a few generations away - maybe Navi, or even the GPU architecture after that.

Lots of the work going into the future of VR from AMD will see the company supporting Valve's Asynchronous Reprojection technology, something AMD is working on with HTC and Valve. Async Reprojection is similar to Oculus' Asynchronous Timewarp (ATW) that provides the 'illusion' of smoother performance, even if the frame rate drops below 90FPS.

Valve's competitor to ATW debuted in a beta track of Steam VR in October, and hit users on November 15. NVIDIA supported Asynchronous Reprojection, but now AMD will have support in the next version of Radeon Software Crimson ReLive, which is expected sometime this month.