AMD announces the Radeon Pro Duo VR-oriented graphics card

I’m a firm believer that virtual reality is the next step in gaming, a game-changing technology with the potential to transform the way we think about computers. If the concept of “immersion” was only defined by outstanding graphics or ultra-wide monitor setups until now, VR has the capability to take gaming immersion to the next level and place gamers in the front-row seats of their preferred universe.

AMD’s Radeon Pro Duo is specifically designed with VR in mind

Virtual reality has been making headlines in the last few years, with a number of companies competing to make it a familiar concept under their name. Implementation has varied from mobile-oriented, almost DIY designs to computer-powered HUDs that promise to revolutionize the gaming industry.

AMD is one company that firmly believes in VR. So much so that their newest graphics card, the Radeon Pro Duo, is centered around it. The company has packed enough horsepower into this bad boy to take customers on the ride of their life. They are so confident in their VR-focused that they’re calling it “[the] world’s most powerful platform for virtual reality“, which in all fairness, after taking a look at what it can, isn’t far from the mark.

The graphics card packs a whopping 16 teraflops of computing performance thanks to its two processing cores and supports the latest version of DirectX 12, which provides the best fidelity for developers and gamers alike. Along with all the hardware goodies that AMD offers, the Radeon Pro Duo runs their proprietary VR SDK, AMD LiquidVR™. This gives VR creators and game developers the tools to take advantage of the horsepower in a simple and efficient way, as well as provide support for most major VR headsets.

Of course, the Pro Duo isn’t only for VR enthusiasts. Being more powerful than the last AMD powerhouse, the R9 295 X2, it sports GCN architecture with asynchronous shaders and support for Vulkan. All of this makes the Radeon Pro Duo a perfect graphics card for 4K gaming or VR.

The company has put some thought in the visual design of the card too, and while aesthetics aren’t the selling point of this behemoth, the effort is still appreciated. The industrial design of the card complements its capabilities and the addition of a closed loop liquid cooling system ensures that temperatures and dBs are kept in check.

In terms of price and availability, AMD announced that the Radeon Pro Duo will be available starting from Q2 and it will come with a pricetag of $1,499 USD. If it’s peaked your interest, you can learn more about the AMD Radeon Pro Duo here.