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VR rendering PC's by AMD
I find this news piece very interesting:
http://www.roadtovr.com/amd-creates-vr- ... t-quantum/
AMD creating a designed-for-VR-PC that is just a little box. I think they're on the right track, this is possibly the future direction of PC rigs. No more the ATX form factor, but you buy a cube/rig from AMD or nVidia, because after all in the future the most important aspect of any PC will be the rendering capabilities for virtual reality purposes.
I'm pretty sure AMD and nVidia would surely like to take over this market, instead of leaving it as it is now where they only make the chips on the video cards. The GPU companies are gonna get huge.
http://www.roadtovr.com/amd-creates-vr- ... t-quantum/
AMD creating a designed-for-VR-PC that is just a little box. I think they're on the right track, this is possibly the future direction of PC rigs. No more the ATX form factor, but you buy a cube/rig from AMD or nVidia, because after all in the future the most important aspect of any PC will be the rendering capabilities for virtual reality purposes.
I'm pretty sure AMD and nVidia would surely like to take over this market, instead of leaving it as it is now where they only make the chips on the video cards. The GPU companies are gonna get huge.
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Hardware: Threadripper 1950x, MSI Gaming Trio 2080TI, Asrock X399 Taich
Headsets: Wrap 1200VR, DK1, DK2, CV1, Rift-S, GearVR, Go, Quest, Quest 2, Reverb G2
When you buy a PC today maybe 70-80% of the overall cost is non-GPU related. You have to buy chassis, motherboard, ram, cpu, psu, and other things.
Imagine if you could buy a PC just as good for the same price (or lower) but where maybe 50-60% of the cost is the GPU.
I think that's the thinking. PC's are expensive, because they're badly designed.
Gigabyte RX Vega 64 x2 | Samsung 960 Evo M.2 500GB | Seagate FireCuda SSHD 2TB | Phanteks ENTHOO EVOLV
Wait a minute...
Why the shocked face?
Intel CPUs are far better in single-threaded calculations, they're better in low latency gaming. AMD is many years behind, so it's perfectly reasonable to use competitor's CPU, if the alternative is to cripple the performance of the most advanced product they have.
They can admit they have no answer to Intel in high-performance gaming CPU segment. But they cannot afford to lower their benchmark scores for their newest and greatest HBM-equipped GPU. Reasonable step.
OFF-TOPIC
That Zen CPU better be really good, because otherwise... well... we already see what Intel does and what doesn't. Lower turbo clock on Skylake CPU, just a cheap thermal grease instead of soldered IHS, high prices etc.
This is the most important segment for the VR progress in the future, and as of now it wobbles on the edge of extinction (meaning: noone gives a damn, no CPU production lines optimized for performance in gaming. It's a 180° different direction to low-power, which is more and more dominant lately.
I hope VR takes off with a bang, and Intel and others will quickly realize there's a potential here.
Still lots of respect for the team-Carmack, Abrash.
Oculus is driven by big corporation principles now. That brings painful effects already, more to come in the future. This is not the Oculus I once cheered for.
Also, all the wires are still required, they're just not shown, and we all know how much you enjoy wires.
Cost? I guess around 3k.
Yeah, no thanks! I'll build my own VR PC.
Excited for AMD to come out with some new CPUs (hopefully more competitive this time).
Gigabyte RX Vega 64 x2 | Samsung 960 Evo M.2 500GB | Seagate FireCuda SSHD 2TB | Phanteks ENTHOO EVOLV
The world of CPU's is in dire need of competition. Its been years since Intels chips have had to make significant performance leaps. 10% every couple of years in uninspiring.
I think that will be yet a long way away for it to be generally practical since it isn't just the bandwidth, but also latency (1 millisecond per 64 miles of fiber distance [roundtrip], not counting router latency), and a company willing to get enough high-end hardware to be sufficient to cover its customers throughout the day in many several dedicated locations all over the country (remember the fiber distance latency issue... they would need a sufficiently rigged server farm with no more than 120 miles radius around them to stay under 2 ms latency under great conditions), and the cost of all this being low enough that customers will be willing to pay monthly to counterbalance the cost of buying the rig themselves (not to mention willing to update their client side hardware occasionally despite having offloaded it to a service), and cable companies to consistently have policies that would make the whole thing not pointless (re, traffic shaping/throttling, bandwidth caps, etc).
And... holy crap the mess that will happen if a server farm went down, or there is a fiber outage (business rely on them will come to a complete halt, none of the general customers will be able to do squat).
I don't think remote rendering will be a thing in the next 10 years. Even firewire/hdmi cables don't have enough bandwidth for for 4K at 90hz, let alone dual 4K at 90hz.
Local rendering units with a direct line to your VR headset is what we need.
2016 is the year AMD finally breaks out of it's Bulldozer cycle, having survived through it's console deals, and demonstrates what happens after it's learned it's lesson and throws 5 years of delayed desktop improvements in a single CPU.
Which also means there should be TONS of cheap second hand Intel quad-cores from 2011-2015 for sale, as PC enthusiast get their first chance in 5 years to perform a worthwhile CPU upgrade.
Although the post-Bulldozer AMD CPUs might be just a few short months too late for the CV1 launch date, unfortunately.
Basically 2016 is the year for massive (unprecedented ? ) desktop CPU performance gains, huge GPU performance increase (high bandwidth memory...), the availability of Windows 10 and it's direct X12 (a good reason for even casual users to buy a new PC that year), huge promotions on pre-2016 PCs (both first hand and second hand), not to mention the availability of 802.11ad Wigig which possibly tops all of that good news put together by itself : Making 2016 the perfect year for a CV1 launch (although 2016Q2 might have been a better choice in some aspects).
And VR enthusiasts have had 3 years to save up for that upgrade (if not 5 years, due to a lack of a worthwhile CPU upgrade path).
One thing missing for VR that I haven't heard of : Dual-GPU VR video cards specialized in low latency, for the high-end VR enthusiasts.
Not to mention PS4 and XboxOne are both powered by AMD : Portability !
AMD cant afford to sell its stuff at cost or a loss which is possibly the only way that would work out. It is in the red... Sadly they need profitable ventures.
Well, the thing is, let's imagine AMD or NVidia deciding to make their own "rendering pc", where they focus on making everything as cheap as possible, barebone costs, PSU, motherboard, memory, etc. only what is required, but overload the unit on the GPU side, like 3-4x more GPU performance than you'd normally get in a high end PC rig. And the costs overall would be the same.
I'm sure this can be done, because motherboard makers, cpu makers, ram makers, psu makers, are all trying to sell their "premium" products at as much high price as possible. So we buy overloaded motherboards, overpowered PSU's, branded RAMs, and mismatch CPU's. When has anyone stopped and asked what motherboard drives their mobile phones? What ram is inside their mobile phones? It simply is irrelevant.
The same should apply to VR rendering units, we should not care about the hard drive, fans, memory, cpu, motherboard or anything. The how many millions of pixels it renders per second should matter the most.
The problem with having the average Joe putting together his PC rig is that he picks the wrong components. He's creates a mismatch combo from hell, unoptimized, overbloated in some aspects and bottlenecked in others. He might get the best CPU, the best GPU, the best memory, but the worst motherboard.
Having experts from AMD and nVidia put this thing together isn't such a stupid idea.
There's a reason why PS4/Xbox machines are so cheap and last so long, they're put together to last and Microsoft and Sony can get a better deal buying hardware components, plus they know what they're doing, they're not gonna overspend on some components and skimp on others, the machines are balanced for peak performance in all aspects. The problem with PS4/Xbox is that they're not good enough for the VR of the future.
If you want to render realtime hyper-realistic worlds in 2x4K panels at 90hz then we'll need to leave the PC behind and move onto something more like a GPU box.