AMD's Raja Koduri says that we need 16K at 240Hz for "true immersion" in VR

AMD's Raja Koduri says that we need 16K at 240Hz for "true immersion" in VR

AMD's Raja Koduri, the head of the Radeon Technology group, has said for a long time that VR is going to the a driving force behind the advancements in GPU performance for many years to come and that he won't be happy until we can run games a 16K at 240Hz within his lifetime, saying that that would be the point where we will achieve "true immersion that you won't be able to tell apart from the real-world". 

2016 is going to be a huge year for AMD's Radeon technologies group, as they move to HBM2 on their upcoming flagship GPUs and are moving to their new Polaris architecture and the 14nm FinFET processing node.  

 "There are several opportunities to take us to the immersive era. We'll be working with game developers and engine developers and so on. If we keep on the current trajectory, we need a million [uncertain - 6:12] per year to get us to the immersive era. This includes the performance you need not just at 200 watts. We need this performance at five watts, so that the VR experience is completely mobile. You'll need that sense of presence.

When I set the goal, I said, "We need to get here in our lifetime." We can't do that with Moore's law and hardware alone. We have to unleash software on this problem. We've been working with developers on all of these ideas. How can we get 16K by 16K displays refreshing at 240Hz with the picture that you want to draw? Developers want more control, on their side. They want console level GPU access on the PC.

What they've been able to achieve on consoles in the current generation, versus the current high-end PC-The current high-end PC specs are at least four to eight times faster than current consoles. The Fury X is an eight teraflop machine. The PS4 is a two teraflop machine. It's four times more compute in that single Fury. You can build a dual Fury PC. But PC doesn't give you that much better an experience with cutting edge content, because they can extract more performance from a console. They're also investing a lot of IP into that architecture. They're doing some really clever things that are not possible on the PC yet."

Raja Koduri says that we will have to rely on a lot more than Moore's Law in order to get into the "VR Era", where resolutions and refresh rates will be much higher than today's Oculus Rift or HTC Vive headsets. Large and intelligent changes in both GPU and software architectures will be the key to driving up performance while lowering power consumption, which is exactly what the AMD's Radeon Technologies group is working towards.  

"We're just entering the VR era. You see all these 4K headsets. If you see what it takes to drive a VR headset, the pixel rate requirements are almost doubled up compared to the previous iteration. That's driving up demand for discrete graphics quite a bit. Now, if you push that forward, when you get to 16K by 16K resolution, 120Hz, you get to a pixel rate of 6 billion pixels per second. We're not going to get there if we just rely on Moore's Law. We have to do disruptive things to get there. That's the goal of our division, to get to the immersive era. We need to double up our products and technology, step-by-step. You'll see the key initiatives and technology this year. You'll see more next year."

Source: Overclock3d.net