AMD Adds ‘Asynchronous Space Warp’ and More in Huge Radeon Software Update

AMD have announced the release of their latest Radeon software suite, snappily titled “Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition” and, among many other features, the new suite brings with it support for Oculus’ newly introduced VR performance enhancement feature Asynchronous Space Warp plus VR focused rendering features ‘MultiRes’ and ‘MultiView’.

AMD’s “Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition” is the latest version of the company’s software suite designed for AMD’s Radeon GPUs. This particular update is packed with new features, including ‘ReLive’ – live video game capture and sharing, ‘Radeon Chill’ – an input rate linked power saving frame rate limiter and enhancements to AMD’s open variable frame rate technology Freesync.

For AMD VR users however, especially those rocking Oculus Rift headsets, the most interesting addition is official support for the platform’s Asynchronous Space Warp performance enhancement. Unveiled at this year’s Oculus Connect developer conference by company CEO Brendan Iribe, ASW is the evolution of ATW (Asynchronous Time Warp) allows judder reducing frame warping for both translational (side to side) and rotational (turning) head movements. The upshot of the announcement was that Oculus declared it’s minimum hardware specification could be dropped.

This is of course great news for AMD GPU owners, however there is some confusion as to which cards are supported with this update. As far as we understand, owners of the current line of 4xx Polaris-based cards will be well catered for, but older 3xx chipset owners are currently out of luck. A statement made recently via Reddit indicates that the company are “looking into the feasibility of enabling ASW on other/older parts.” We’ve reached out to AMD to clarify the situation here.

Update Dec 8th 14:38 GMT: AMD have confirmed that ASW is at present supported only on 4xx AMD GPU chipsets.

As well as ASW, the latest LiquidVR (the company’s VR focused API suite) suite included with the Crimson ReLive release adds two more important VR rendering features, MultiView and MultiRes. MultiView is AMD’s equivalent of NVIDIA’s SMP (Simultaneous Multi-projection) which greatly enhances efficiency when rendering stereoscopic scenes (which of course all desktop VR headsets do). MultiRes is equivalent to NVIDIA’s Multi-res Shading, a performance optimisation which reduces detail of the rendered view the further towards the edge of a user’s field of view. Both will be important performance enhancements as the costs of entry for VR capable PC hardware drops.

The latest Radeon release with the latest LiquidVR is an important milestone for the company, keeping its core VR performance featureset competitive with NVIDIA’s as we approach the second year of high fidelity PC based consumer virtual reality. AMD card owners can grab the latest software from here.