AMD reveals the dual-GPU Radeon Pro Duo aimed at VR developers

AMD has big plans for 2016. Between PlayStation VR blasting them up in the VR market share, their new low-wattage Polaris architecture, and GPUOpen steadily gaining momentum, they're locked and loaded this year more than any other in recent memory. To get the ball rolling, the boys in red and black announced the Radeon Pro Duo, their answer to the hardball tech requirements of the VR development world.

You might remember the Pro Duo as an early concept way back at E3 2015, but we've seen neither hide nor hair of AMD's Dual FIJI GPU on the hardware spectrum since then. That is, until earlier this week, when AMD announced that their new developer-level powerhouse is officially headed to market come Q2 2016.

The Power of Duo

The Radeon Pro Duo is a special kind of harmony, carrying the power and capacity of two FIJI GPUs in a single package. That means double the processing power and, in this case, double the RAM of other HBM options on the market, but without a number of the complications you would normally have to work around with AMD CrossFire or Nvidia SLI.

According to Ars Technica, “Both GPUs on the Radeon Pro Duo sport the full array of 4096 stream processors, 256 texture units, and 256 ROPs. There's 8GB of high bandwidth memory on board, split between the two GPUs, running at 1GHz on a substantial 4096-bit bus for 512GB/s of bandwidth.”

All of these elements combine to make the Radeon Pro Duo clock in at a peak compute performance of 16 teraflops – significantly more than double that of the GTX 980Ti, the R9 290X, and the Titan X. Unfortunately, this performance comes with an equally impressive $1500 price tag, which sets it firmly in the domain of developers and the hardest of hardcore enthusiasts.

Even then, enthusiasts are likely better off simply shooting for any of a number of CrossFire or SLI alternatives. You'll likely spend less, and still see similar frame-pe- second performance on appropriately optimized games. 

For VR Devs First

The biggest hitch in the Radeon Pro Duo's stride is that of unfortunate timing – with both Polaris and Pascal GPUs set to release sometime later this year, it's hard to justify upgrading to a $1500 alternative when something smaller, faster, and with a lower TDP could be just around the corner.

Early demos for Polaris have already shown TDP as low as 86 watts, which is tiny compared to the current FIJI based AMD cards on the market, some of which can pull as much as 290 watts. Smart money says that considering the Pro Duo is rolling two graphics cards into a single convenient package, it'll require a similar power draw to CrossFire cards of the same generation, which could easily push its TDP into the 350-400 watt range. A number that gets more ludicrous the higher it climbs, no matter how fancy of a PSU you’re packing.

Of course, it's likely that AMD knows it missed the bulk of the consumer window for the Radeon Pro Duo, which is why they're focusing on marketing and distributing to developers – more specifically, VR focused developers. AMD has already secured a partnership with Crytek's VR First academic program to provide Radeon Pro Duos to Bahçeşehir University in Istanbul, with plans to extend that same support to other schools with a particularly VR-focused program later in the year. AMD might not win over a huge number of consumers with the Pro Duo, but the foothold it can earn them in the budding VR development circle could be a huge advantage in the long run.