As part of AMD’s Capsaicin event in San Francisco today, the company is making some bold statements around its strategy for VR, including massive market share dominance, new readiness programs and the future of VR with the Polaris architecture due out this year.

The most surprising statement made by AMD at the event was the claim that “AMD is powering the overwhelming majority of home entertainment VR systems around the world, with an estimated 83 percent market share.” This is obviously not based on discrete GPU sales in the PC market alone, but instead includes the sales of the PlayStation 4 game console, for which Sony will launch its own PlayStation VR headset later this year. (Side note, does JPR not include the array of Samsung phones to be “home entertainment VR” systems?)

There is no denying that Sony's install base with the PS4 has put AMD in the driver seat when it comes to global gaming GPU distribution, but as of today this advantage has not amounted to anything noticeable in the PC space – a stance that AMD was selling hard before the consoles’ launch. I am hesitant to put any weight behind AMD’s PS4 integration for VR moving forward, so the company will have to prove that this is in fact an advantage for the chip maker going into 2016.

AMD is talking up other partnerships as well, including those with HTC and Oculus for their respective headset launches, due in the next 30 days. Beyond that, AMD hardware is being used in the just announced Sulon Q wireless VR headset and has deals in place with various healthcare, media and educational outlets to seed development hardware.

For system vendors and add-in card builders, AMD is launching a certification program that will create labels of “Radeon™ VR Ready Premium” and “Radeon™ VR Ready Creator”. The former will be assigned to graphics cards at Radeon R9 290 performance and above to indicate they are capable of meeting the specifications required by Oculus and HTC for their VR headsets; the latter is going to be assigned only to the Radeon Pro Duo dual-Fiji graphics card, meant to target developers that need maximum performance.

Finally, AMD is showing that its next generation graphics architecture, Polaris, is capable of VR as well.

AMD today demonstrated for the first time ever the company’s forthcoming Polaris 10 GPU running Valve’s Aperture Science Robot Repair demo powered by the HTC Vive Pre. The sample GPU features the recently announced Polaris GPU architecture designed for 14nm FinFET, optimized for DirectX® 12 and VR, and boasts significant architectural improvements over previous AMD architectures including HDR monitor support, industry-leading performance-per-watt 2, and AMD’s 4th generation Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture.

We are still waiting to see if this is the same silicon that AMD showed at CES, a mainstream part, or if we might be witnessing the first demo of a higher end part, wetting the appetite of the enthusiast community.