AMD Radeon Live Blog - AMD Presents: The New Era of PC Gaming

12:05PM EDT - AMD is talking about the rise of e-sports gaming

12:06PM EDT - Display resolutions are rapidly increasing. 4K monitors have dropped from $3000 to $400-600

12:06PM EDT - Smooth frame rates have become another area of focus, in addition to simply having a high frame rate

12:07PM EDT - Virtual reality is also an area that AMD sees as rapidly expanding

12:07PM EDT - VR requires exceptionally high frame rates and low latency

12:08PM EDT - Okay, after some WiFi problems we';re here

12:08PM EDT - Now on stage: Devin Nekechuk to introduce the Radeon 300 series

12:09PM EDT - AMD is starting off by talking about the R7 and R9 300 series cards.

12:09PM EDT - First up, R7 360

12:11PM EDT - AMD is discussing VSR. Not exclusive to the 300 series though.

12:13PM EDT - First card is the R7 360, the base of the line.

12:13PM EDT - R7 370 is next. $149 and up to 4GB of VRAM. Not clear if those two go together, as they said "up to"

12:14PM EDT - Now moving onto cards for more intensive games, and for gaming at higher resolutions

12:15PM EDT - Next is the R9 380. AMD claims it can power 1440p. Starts at $199, up to 4GB VRAM.

12:15PM EDT - R9 390 and 390X start at $329 and $429. Both have 8GB of GDDR5. Meant for 4K gaming

12:17PM EDT - Now talking about DX12

12:17PM EDT - DX12 launching with Win10, July 29th is not far away

12:18PM EDT - AMD now inviting up some game developers and a Microsoft developer

12:19PM EDT - Developers seeing significant CPU usage reductions with DX12

12:21PM EDT - Now talking to the developer from Lionhead about DX12 in the Fable series

12:22PM EDT - Asynchronous shaders to execute shading concurrently with other rendering are an important feature

12:23PM EDT - Windows 10 beta of Fable Legends coming in the near future.

12:24PM EDT - Now on display: Stardock/Oxide's Ashes of the Singularity

12:24PM EDT - Now talking about RTS games

12:25PM EDT - Oxide is going to be one of the first companies to really use DX12. They're looking to push a lot of draw calls

12:25PM EDT - RTS games have traditionally had to swap to 2D sprites when characters are too far away. Not required with DX12.

12:26PM EDT - CPU power freed up by using DX12 can be put into making more complex AI

12:27PM EDT - Alpha this Thursday

12:27PM EDT - Now moving onto VR. AMD's Richard Huddy is back on stage

12:29PM EDT - Anuj Gosalia of Oculus is talking

12:30PM EDT - AMD is going to be banking hard on VR for this generation. From a business standpoint it requires lot of GPU power, and from a tech standpoint they have what should be a good solution

12:31PM EDT - Low latency is the big focus in VR

12:31PM EDT - Now discussing how Oculus is using AMD's LiqudVR tech, which was first announced back at GDC in March

12:32PM EDT - Oculus has been working with AMD to use their LiquidVR tech

12:32PM EDT - Direct hardware access for low latency, multi-GPU per-eye rendering, async shading/warping, etc

12:32PM EDT - Oculus has shipped 150K dev kits (wow)

12:33PM EDT - Oculus has shipped 150,000 dev kits so far

12:33PM EDT - And of course, the final consumer Rift ships in Q1 of next year

12:35PM EDT - For AMD GPUs, Oculus is recommending R9 290/390 and higher

12:35PM EDT - Recommended GPU spec for Oculus is the R9 290 or faster

12:35PM EDT - This is consistent with their earlier developer target recommendation of R9 290

12:36PM EDT - Now speaking, CCP on EVE: Valkyrie

12:36PM EDT - They've been one of the darling early VR demos, and will be shipping on PC and PS4 (Morpheus)

12:37PM EDT - Game will be released alongside the Rift, so Q1 2016 (it)

12:38PM EDT - Huddy now has the stage to himself again

12:38PM EDT - Discussing how VR is being used for non-gaming applications

12:38PM EDT - Now on stage, Katrina Craigwell from GE

12:39PM EDT - GE is using VR for brain imaging visualization

12:41PM EDT - And that's a wrap on GE

12:42PM EDT - Okay, time for the high-end GPU announcement

12:42PM EDT - (If you haven't already seen the leaks, well, then you'll probably be the only person surprised by this)

12:42PM EDT - Now on stage, Chris Hook of AMD. Director of marketing

12:43PM EDT - Leading into a discussion about small form factor PCs

12:44PM EDT - Presenting Project Quantum

12:44PM EDT - A custom SFF case

12:45PM EDT - Contains 2 of AMD's new Fiji GPUs

12:45PM EDT - Processors on the bottom, cooling on the top

12:45PM EDT - Now rolling a promo video

12:47PM EDT - Begun, the Closed Loop Liquid Cooler wars have

12:47PM EDT - The company has clearly taken what they've learned from R9 295X2

12:47PM EDT - Which, though $1500 was a successful product for a dual-GPU card and a solid design

12:48PM EDT - Now on stage, AMD's CEO, Dr. Lisa Su

12:48PM EDT - "Most complex and highest performance GPU we have ever built"

12:49PM EDT - There will be multiple products with Fiji

12:49PM EDT - AMD Radeon R9 Fury X

12:50PM EDT - 1.5x perf per watt of R9 290X

12:50PM EDT - R9 Fury (vanilla) will be air-cooled

12:50PM EDT - Cards will be in stores "very shortly"

12:51PM EDT - AMD Radeon R9 Nano

12:51PM EDT - Fiji in a a 6" card, half the power of 290X

12:51PM EDT - (Sounds like it's significantly cut down from full Fiji)

12:51PM EDT - Nano will be available later this summer

12:52PM EDT - Finally, a dual-GPU card that's in the Quantum, but hasn't been named or shown

12:52PM EDT - Now on stage, Joe Marci, Raja Koduri, and Chris Hook again

12:53PM EDT - Raja is now explaining the human element behind designing Fiji

12:55PM EDT - Focus on 4K and HBM

12:55PM EDT - Specs

12:55PM EDT - 4069 stream processors, 8.9B transistors

12:55PM EDT - 4096 SPs, even

12:55PM EDT - 8.6 TFLOPs, 1050MHz core clock

12:56PM EDT - Also did some work on power management/efficiency, though now going in-depth at this time

12:56PM EDT - Raja is giving special credit to the board design team

12:57PM EDT - Joe now talking a bit more on HBM

12:58PM EDT - AMD has over the last several years been on the cutting edge of memory tech. 2015 and Fiji is no different

12:58PM EDT - HBM gets AMD more memory bandwidth, but also cuts down on memory power, giving them more power headroom for the GPU itself

12:59PM EDT - AMD will be putting HBM in more devices in the future (where costs make sense, of course)

01:00PM EDT - Raja has never been so excited in the last 20 years

01:01PM EDT - Laying the path for the future

01:01PM EDT - They see higher quality VR systems as requiring much, much more GPU performance

01:02PM EDT - The Holodeck concept and Eyefinity seems to have given way to VR and the holodeck on your head

01:03PM EDT - Joe is talking a bit about overclocking headroom. AMD says it should be a good overclocker

01:03PM EDT - Fury X goes on sale on the 24th

01:03PM EDT - $649

01:03PM EDT - Fury (vanilla) for $549 on July 14th

01:04PM EDT - Nano in the summer, dual-GPU card in the fall

01:04PM EDT - So the fight is set: Fury X needs to meet or beat NVIDIA's GTX 980 Ti. AMD is aiming to best NVIDIA's top Maxwell GPU

01:05PM EDT - To close things out, Huddy is back on stage

01:05PM EDT - Will be showing the PC version of Star Wars: Battlefront

01:06PM EDT - DICE's Lead Producer (whose name I couldn't type out fast enough) is now on stage

01:07PM EDT - Frostbite engine game, so they already have all the tech Johan Andersson has been working on

01:07PM EDT - Discussing the production of the game

01:09PM EDT - Rolling PC footage

01:10PM EDT - A very short clip indeed

01:11PM EDT - AMD will have it playable at SDCC next month

01:12PM EDT - Recap time

01:13PM EDT - That's a wrap

01:14PM EDT - Thanks for joining us, everyone