The Year of VR

Here’s the buzz on virtual reality and what the two biggest names in gaming processors are busy with.

Virtual Reality is all the rage these days and the two biggest names of the gaming world are going out of their way to outdo the competition in an effort to establish themselves as the king of VR. So let’s see what the two biggest names in the gaming world, namely, NVIDIA and AMD have up their sleeves when it comes to capitalising on the VR craze.

Team Green has been relatively hush hush regarding any VR specific hardware, however, on the software side of things they have been taking huge strides to ready up for the new tech. A whole slew of VR ready drivers have already hit GeForce experience and have been reported to run very well on the developer version of the various VR headsets on offer. Moreover, NVIDIA has made great strides towards making their platform more amenable for developers and now both the Unreal Engine 4 and the Unity engine are supported on the NVIDIA platform.

Additionally, thanks to their PhysX technology, certain VR exclusive titles like Everest are claiming an unparalleled experience on NVIDIA powered systems. It’ll be very interesting to see how leading developers adopt PhysX to their upcoming games for this feature to finally realise the initial promise that it showed.

If Team Green is making strides on the software front, Team Red, a.k.a. AMD is making waves in the hardware segment of things. Having already asserted the number dominance over NVIDIA as AMD controls the entire console market, the Red Team is now all set to launch the dual GPU board Radeon Pro Duo. This behemoth of a device is capable of processing data at 16 teraflops, essentially making it a supercomputer in its own right. AMD says that this is going to be the quintessential device for all VR game developers and also has a consumer variant of this beast planned for release later this year.

With giant developers like Ubisoft and the likes jumping into the fray, it is up to AMD and NVIDIA to come up with affordable solutions to bring VR to your doorstep. Word has it that the high end Pascal cards from NVIDIA will be some of the fastest cards we have ever seen, and will be ideally placed for VR gaming.

AMD on the other hand is taking steps towards ensuring that the cost of entry into the VR space is lowered significantly, something they have to do as consoles are nowhere near as powerful as GPUs out today, let alone Pascal. It’ll be really interesting to see how this pans out in the coming few months, will VR be the next leap in gaming or will it lose steam and fade away into the shadows much the same way as stereoscopic 3D had.