So basically AMD has a bunch of better tech that you have a hard time seeing what makes it so special?
Spot on! I have a very hard time seeing what makes it so special.
Is AMD currently ahead in VR? According to them and you, they are, as you would expect. But even
if they are at this very moment, the question is whether or not that being ahead is a temporary thing or a long lasting competitive advantage. That's why I'm focusing on hardware features and not software. Software can be fixed over time. AMD used to suck at crossfire, but was able to fix it eventually. AMD used to be seriously behind with their variable refresh rate driver support. They fixed most of that eventually as well. Nvidia initially solved their lack of Eyefinity (a hardware advantage) in software. If VR really picks up, not a given at all, whoever is behind will give it the right priority and try to fix it. Simple.
So, once again, I asked
originally if there was anything specific in Pascal, and AMD, that makes them fundamentally better for VR. It's much harder for software to be a fundamental advantage.
VR SLI is a joke which has been promised by Nvidia for 18 months and yet to be delivered, it's nowhere near affinity multi-GPU.
Software feature.
Nvidia has nothing like latest data latch and ...
Software feature.
... their timewarp is bad due to lacking fine-grained preemption.
With GP100 having fine-grained compute preemption, there's a good chance that graphics preemption will be present as well. If so, then no fundamental benefit here either. So let's defer this one for later...
This matters because believe it or not VR is not simply "all about rendering triangles." Latency is even more important than throughput, that's why Woz was feeling dizzy at GTC on Mars with Titan X.
Given the same amount of work, latency is also defined by throughput. Nvidia has
multi-resolution shading, whereby geometry gets transformed only once, yet can be used for multiple viewports. For lens systems like those in the Rift and the Vive, this can accelerate pixel shading by 1.3x to 2x. Given the need to render at 90 fps, doesn't that sound like a useful feature to have?
So in conclusion: AMD has fine grained preemption, which Nvidia may have as well. AMD has TrueAudio. Nvidia has multi-resolution shading.
It don't think that's a strong case for having a fundamental advantage. YMMV.
I don't recall suggesting Pascal would be 1.2GHz.
"There are for sure reasons to believe that Nvidia may not increase on Maxwell's clock speeds, or not by much. 1.2GHz is the magic number I believe."