AMD has joined in on the virtual reality (VR) fun by announcing Liquid VR, a software development kit that should improve VR by lowering latency as much as possible.
We already knew that a big part of Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2015, currently being held in San Francisco, will be about virtual reality and it appears that AMD wants a piece of that cake as well, as the company has announced its Liquid VR software development kit that aims to lower latency by optimizing "the entire processing pipeline", from the GPU to the display on the VR headsets.

The LiquidVR 1.0 SKD, which will be available to developers soon, focuses on four different technologies, Async Shaders, Affinity Multi-GPU, Latest data latch and Direct-to-display.





The Async Shaders should offer smooth head-tracking by enabling Hardware-Accelerated Time Warp, a technology that uses user's head position after the frame has been rendered and warps the image to reflect the new viewpoint, all in order to minimize latency between user and the VR headset screen.




The Affinity Multi-GPU for scalable rendering is a technology that will allow multiple GPUs to work together in order to improve framerate in VR applications by allowing them to assign work to run on specific GPU, making multi-GPU configurations ideal for virtual reality.




Latest data latch, is a programming mechanism which will also improve head-tracking by getting tracking data from head-mounted display to the GPU as quickly as possible and thus eliminating any API overhead and reducing latency.




Last but not the least is the Direct-to-display feature which aims to deliver plug-and-play VR experience on AMD Radeon graphics cards.




According to AMD, latency should be around 10ms, which is quite impressive and aims to deliver 100FPS to user eyes, something that Oculus is also aiming at with its Oculus Rift VR headset.

According to this, AMD will not be a part of hardware VR race, but it definitely wants to be a general part of virtual reality.





Source: AMD.com.