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AMD and Bethesda teamed up to enhance games for Vega and Ryzen. AMD has developed a sort of annual tradition since its Radeon Technologies Group unveiled the Game Developers Conference Capsaicin & Cream event. Unlike the usual activities produced by the company, like the ones for major product launches, the Capsaicin events aim to help businesses develop certain relations and connections with other people from the game development community.
On the one hand, this group has abolished the architecture of Graphics Core Next in consoles for several years now. On the other hand, the company operates in a field where NVIDIA represents 75% of the dGPU market in the PC space. AMD accounts for a part of a successful developer educational effort of the company.
This year, for their Game Developers Conference, AMD had some announcements to make. Regarding the VR field, AMD stated that they are almost ready to make available their GPU support which is optimized for the asynchronous reprojection feature of the Vive/SteamVR. Similar to the asynchronous timewarp feature which was announced by Oculus a year ago, AMD’s asynchronous reprojection constitutes a way of reassessing a mixture of new input data and old frame data to create a new structure on the spot in case a proper new frame will not be set by the refresh deadline.
The idea which lies at the core of the asynchronous reprojection is that they preferred to use a distorted version of the previous frame based on the latest input information, making the world seem as if updating around the user and correlating the head motions, instead of redisplaying an old frame and presenting distortion to the user. Even if this is not the most appropriate solution to a lack of immediately provided structures, at least it can make VR bearable in case a game cannot keep up with the 90Hz rate demanded by the headset.
This feature is based on the GPU because the GPU driver and the SteamVR runtime need to dispatch and execute the reprojection command to assure that it is ready just in time for the next display refresh. When it comes to AMD, they not only expect this scenario but they also want to improve upon it by implementing their asynchronous implementation abilities.
Vulkan represents Khronos’ low-level grphics API which has been available for more than a year. Nevertheless, due to its extensive developmental process for games is still trying to find its basis. However, AMD and Bethesda are bound to focus on implementing Vulkan to all the games of Bethesda to leverage the benefits of low-level graphics APIs.
Image courtesy of: wikipedia
