News
News Categories

MSI’s WT72 is the world’s first VR Ready mobile workstation to deliver professional VR experiences anywhere

By Vijay Anand - on 8 Apr 2016, 12:43am

MSI’s WT72 is the world’s first VR Ready mobile workstation to deliver professional VR experiences anywhere

The MSI WT72 is equipped to tackle the most challenging visual computing tasks. Plus, it comes certified for Autodesk VRED to create amazing, immersive 3D design environments.

In January at CES 2016, NVIDIA debuted the GeForce GTX VR Ready label program to help consumers easily identify capable machines that can deliver a smooth VR gaming experience. Now, NVIDIA builds upon this to identify and certify professional systems to deliver a great VR experience in a vast variety of professional applications with the NVIDIA VR Ready program

As you might have heard by now, VR gaming requires some serious hardware to ensure each eye of the VR headset receives a high enough frame rate and resolution to provide a convincing gameplay. Latency between your VR headgear movements and what’s shown on the headset’s screen must also be lower than 20ms to avoid motion sickness and screen-to-action delays. Professional VR applications are no different and need to conform to these requirements too.

Unlike the GeForce VR Ready program for end-user systems. Quadro professional GPUs power NVIDIA professional VR Ready systems. These systems put NVIDIA’s VRWorks software development kit at the fingertips of VR headset and application developers. VRWorks offers exclusive tools and technologies - including Context Priority, Multi-Res Shading, Warp & Blend, Synchronization, GPU Affinity and GPU Direct - so pro developers can create great VR experiences.

A handful of workstations have already been VR Ready certified along with minimum desktop system components should you need an idea of basic requirements to experience VR in professional applications.

However, MSI and NVIDIA collaborated one step further to bring about the world’s first professional mobile VR workstation – the MSI WT72. The most important ingredient of the MSI WT72 is its brand new NVIDIA Quadro M5500 GPU, which is the fastest that NVIDIA has listed for mobile workstations. For those wondering how the new Quadro M5500 GPU stacks up in the Quadro line-up, here’s table from NVIDIA:-

Unlike other Quadro mobile GPUs, the M5500 is actually a desktop grade GeForce GTX 980 GPU that has been qualified to run on a mobile platform. It has the same 2,048 CUDA cores as the desktop class GeForce GTX 980. This means the chip has a much higher TDP, but it seems like the 17.3-inch MSI WT72 has no problems tackling it, just like how a select few of their GeForce based gaming notebooks also feature desktop class GPUs. From what we understand, a desktop GeForce GTX 970 is the minimum requirement to deliver capable VR experience. As such, the MSI WT72 with the Quadro M5500 GPU is more than capable.

But what’s really special about the MSI WT72 is that it allows businesses to show their customers at their own premises a VR environment that would allow them to make more informed decisions and make necessary changes from a realistically visual environment. Designers, engineers and researchers too can share this experience to anyone at any time without the decision makers having to travel to a premises that’s equipped with a suitable desktop workstation. This saves a lot of time, improve productivity and better meet expectations for the project managed. You only need the MSI WT72 workstation and a suitable VR headset to take the VR experience mobile to any premises.

SteelSeries backlit keyboard.

As for the outlook and build of the new MSI WT72, it retains much of the same design philosophy as the rest of MSI’s gaming and workstation class notebooks. You also get the same SteelSeries keyboard, Dynaudio speakers, Nahimic audio enhancer, Thunderbolt 3 port and Super RAID 4 (dual M.2 PCIe SSDs in RAID and a large capacity HDD), among others.

The below table lists the configurations available for the MSI WT72-6QN workstation notebook and it starts from US$5,499. For reference, you might also be interested to check out a 15.6-inch MSI WS60 20J 4K Edition workstation that we had encountered earlier.

Source: NVIDIA, NVIDIA GTC 2016

Join HWZ's Telegram channel here and catch all the latest tech news!
Our articles may contain affiliate links. If you buy through these links, we may earn a small commission.