AMD quietly unveils cloud gaming ambitions at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2013 with Radeon Sky, a graphics cards series designed to power game streaming services on PCs, smart TVs and mobile devices.
The lineup consists of 3 graphics cards built on Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture-- model 900 (with x2 Tahiti Pro (aka Radeon 7950) graphics processors), model 700 (with x1 Tahiti Pro chip) and the model 500 (with a Pitcairn XT (aka Radeon HD 7870) GPU).
According to AMD each Radeon Sky card handles up to x6 simultaneous HD game streams and supports a wide server range.
"Real-time gaming through the cloud represents a significant opportunity and AMD is poised to lead in this vertical thanks to our extensive graphics hardware and software capabilities," the company says. "AMD is working closely with CiiNow,G-Cluster, Otoy and Ubitus to deliver exceptional AMD Radeon gaming experiences to the cloud."
Together with GCN architecture AMD includes so-called RapidFire technology-- a combination of hardware and software providing cloud gaming partners with an open API allowing the manipulation of key hardware controls according to visual quality, latency and network bandwidth.
The company offers little more details on the initiative at GDC 2013, but it appears developers and cloud gaming providers have to enlist the hardware before customers can take advantage of its capabilities.