AMD’s Radeon Pro Duo will be officially launching on the 26th of April 2016. The GPU houses two full-fledged Fiji GPUs with a total of 8196 stream processors and 8GB HBM (memory). The card prominently features LiquidVR - which is AMD's purpose built platform for VR content. The dual-GPU monster has an MSRP of $1500 and will be landing at the end of April.
Radeon Pro Duo, AMD's dual-Fiji flagship landing on the 26th of April - will retail for $1500
The Radeon Pro Duo, so far, holds the title of the most powerful graphics card. One of the primary criticisms leveraged at dual-GPU graphic cards is that they are working in what is essentially Crossfire. Which means that the scaling is not what a single GPU setup with twice the specifications would offer. In the case of VR however, things are different. Unlike in 2D, VR requires simultaneous outputs to two screens (one for each eye). With some very clever software engineering (and underlying hardware support on the Fijis), Liquid VR allows devs to gain close to 100% scaling on VR applications.
AMD has been focusing a lot on the VR industry with this generation of GPUs and it aims to make VR within the reach of more consumers (by increasing the total available market). Running virtual reality headsets such as the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive requires quite a bit of horsepower, which in the case of the Oculus Rift is 2k resolution at 90 frames per second. This graphical horsepower can be produced by GPUs equivalent (or more) in power to the GTX 970 or the Radeon R9 290. However, as we up the visual fidelity, maintaining this standard gets very hard, and this is where the Radeon Pro Duo and LiquidVR combo come in.
LiquidVR is a set of technologies that has a very clear mission: to take maximum advantage of GPUs to enable rich and seamless content.
As VR technology evolves, so will LiquidVR – we have a robust road map that will tackle a wide range of issues the industry already talks up as the next set of challenges we’ll be facing. We believe that with LiquidVR, AMD has helped the industry to take a first big step in this wonderful new immersive world called virtual reality.
LiquidVR will continue to drive hardware and software technologies that will ultimately lead to the nirvana of VR: 16K/eye, 144Hz and above refresh rate, and virtually no latency, all in a wireless, small form factor package - AMD's Guennadi Riguer in an interview to Wccftech.
The Radeon Pro Duo will be able to leverage LiquidVR (exposed in DX11) and DirectX 12 to offer an incredible platform for VR content across all major setups. With over 16 TFLOPS of FP32, it can easily handle VR workloads better than any other single graphics card setup out there right now. The Oculus Rift and HTC Vive have already started rolling out and this GPU is the perfect single graphics card solution to power them. If Dual-GPU is not your thing, or you don't have the budget for it, AMD will be launching the Polaris 10 and 11 GPUs this year which should offer the "minimum VR spec" at a much more affordable level. Here are the final specifications of the AMD Radeon Pro Duo graphics card:
AMD Radeon Duo Pro Specifications
| WCCFTech | AMD Radeon Pro Duo | AMD Radeon R9 Fury X | AMD Radeon R9 Nano | AMD Radeon R9 Fury | AMD Radeon R9 290X |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GPU | Fiji XT x 2 | Fiji XT | Fiji XT | Fiji Pro | Hawaii XT |
| Stream Processors | 8192 | 4096 | 4096 | 3584 | 2816 |
| GCN Compute Units | 128 | 64 | 64 | 56 | 44 |
| Render Output Units | 128 | 64 | 64 | 64 | 64 |
| Texture Mapping Units | 512 | 256 | 256 | 224 | 176 |
| GPU Frequency | Up to 1000 Mhz | Up to 1050Mhz | Up to 1000 MHz | Up to 1000 MHz | 1000Mhz |
| Memory | 8GB HBM (4 GB Per GPU) | 4GB HBM | 4GB HBM | 4GB HBM | 4GB GDDR5 |
| Memory Interface | 8192bit (4096 Per GPU) | 4096bit | 4096bit | 4096bit | 512bit |
| Memory Frequency | 500Mhz | 500Mhz | 500 MHz | 500Mhz | 1250Mhz |
| Effective Memory Speed | 1Gbps | 1Gbps | 1Gbps | 1Gbps | 5Gbps |
| Memory Bandwidth | 1 TB/s | 512GB/s | 512GB/s | 512GB/s | 320GB/s |
| Cooling | Liquid Cooling | Liquid Cooling | Air Cooling | Air Cooling | Air Cooling |
| Performance (FP32) | 16.38 TFLOPs | 8.6 TFLOPS | 8.19 TFLOPS | 7.2 TFLOPS | 5.6 TFLOPS |
| TDP | 350W | 275W | 175W | 275W | 250W |
| Launch Price | $1500 | $649 | $649 | $549 | $549 |
| Launch Date | 26th April | 24th June 2015 | 7th September 2015 | 10th July 2015 | 24th October 2013 |
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