AMD's Capsaicin Livestream event during GDC has kicked off, detailing many of the developments and graphics technologies planned for the upcoming year. The event has understandably focussed on Virtual Reality, the new platform and area for growth in computing this year, and both Liquid VR and GPUOpen initiatives took centre stage. Each of the initiatives, which focus on openness and cross-industry cooperation in generating the best tools for all-comers, should help to make creating games and especially engines more easy; as a result they're key for the folks at GDC. However the team in red couldn't resist a brief hardware tease.

Long awaited, and now seemingly imminent, is AMD's dual-GPU solution based around the Fiji GPU. Originally floated in July last year, but delayed from a 2015 launch to coincide with consumer VR hardware this Spring, the card is now known as the AMD Radeon Pro Duo. The card will fill dual roles: both as a flagship VR gaming solution, and a VR development platform for hardware and software tools.



Technical specifications are currently known only in general terms, but AMD have revealed that the GPU will feature two Fiji-class GPUs kept in check by a liquid cooling system similar to the R9 Fury X and R9 295X2 'Hydra'. Memory-wise it's equipped with 8GB HBM RAM - the first time HBM RAM has been incorporated into a workstation-class GPU - and it supports four Displayport outputs as standard. Thermal and power considerations mean that the underlying power architecture probably has a lot in common with the R9 Nano rather than it's more power-hungry R9 Fury X sibling.



AMD are touting the Radeon Pro Duo as a card for the gamer who wants to create, or the creator who wants to game. However fundamentally it's a pixel-pushing workhorse, with theoretical single-precision pixel processing performance in the 16TFLOPS region.

More information on the Radeon Pro Duo will likely to revealed in the coming weeks.