In an event at SIGGRAPH this evening, AMD’s Radeon Technology Group introduced a new line of ‘Radeon Pro’ WX-series GPUs. AMD has aimed the WX 7100 specifically at virtual reality content creation.
Radeon Pro WX 7100 Release Date, Specs, and Price
Built on AMD’s latest ‘Polaris’ architecture, the company calls the Radeon Pro WX 7100 “the most affordable workstation solution for professional VR content creation.” The card, along with its siblings the WX 5100 and WX 4100, are expected to be released in Q4 of 2016. The WX 7100 will be priced at “less than $1,000.”
WX 7100 Specs
- 32 AMD Compute Units
- >5 TFLOPS Peak Single Precision
- Up to 4, 5K displays with 4x DisplayPort 1.3
- 8GB GPU memory
- 256 bit memory bandwidth
The ‘Pro’ series is new for AMD, and Raja Koduri, SVP & chief architect of the Radeon Technologies Group explained at the event what users can expect from Radeon Pro GPUs:
- Hardware exclusively built by AMD
- 24/7 VIP customer support “committed to providing 5 minutes or less wait time”
- 3-year limited warranty plus a free, 7-year extended limited warranty
- Optimizations for professional applications
- Certified for workstation performance and reliability
Project Loom for 360 Video Stitching
The WX 7100 is presumably going to work well with output from AMD’s newly announced ‘Project Loom’, a real-time 360 video stitcher “for professional use”. The company says Project Loom can pull in up to 24 camera feeds at 1080p and 60 FPS, then stitch and output the resulting 360 video at 4K resolution and 30 FPS to VR headsets and mobile devices.
AMD says Loom will be released as open source on the company’s GPUOpen site later this summer.
On the consumer/gaming end of the spectrum, AMD recently launched the VR-ready RX 480 GPU starting at $199.