AMD will be the sole GPU presence in the labs at universities participating in Crytek’s VR First initiative, which “provides colleges and universities a ready-made VR solution for developers, students and researchers”, according to AMD.

AMD is leveraging the newly-announced Radeon Pro Duo graphics cards for this partnership, which lends immediate credibility to their positioning of the new GPU for VR development.

“The new labs will be equipped with AMD Radeon™ Pro Duo graphics cards with LiquidVR™ SDK, the world’s fastest VR content creator platform bridging content creation and consumption and offering an astonishing 16 teraflops of compute power. Designed to be compatible with multiple head mounted displays, including the Oculus Rift™ and HTC Vive™, AMD Radeon™ Pro Duo cards will encourage grassroots VR development around the world. The initial VR First Lab at Bahçeşehir University in Istanbul is already up and running in January of this year.”

Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli explains VR First:

“VR First labs will become key incubators for nurturing new talent in VR development and creating a global community well-prepared to innovate in this exciting and emerging field. VR experiences, harnessing the power of the CRYENGINE and developed using world-class Radeon™ hardware and software, will have the potential to fundamentally transform how we interact with technology.”

This certainly appears to be an early win for AMD in VR development, at least in the higher education sector.