A few weeks ago NVIDIA introduced the RTX 3000 that no longer use USB Type C for VirtualLink. This connector has recently been declared dead, so there is no point in implementing it. It seems that AMD does not think the same, because their Big Navi graphics could implement the USB Type C connector. This shows once again that AMD is far behind NVIDIA in the market.
NVIDIA, HTC, Valve and Microsoft have officially declared the VirtualLink connector dead. Of all those who supported this connection for Virtual Reality, only AMD would continue to support it, more or less. It seems that the Big Navi design predates the communication that this connector had become obsolete.
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AMD will implement the USB Type C VirtualLink connector in the Big Navi
It becomes very evident that AMD in the graphics card market is still well behind NVIDIA. The Ampere graphics are a hard blow for AMD that will again be able to compete with the mid-range with many sacrifices. Nor do we know very well at this point how AMD will deal with Ray Tracing, where NVIDIA has a great advantage.
Through a driver patch of the open source AMDGPU driver for Linux we know the support for USB-C. Sienna Cichild, codename of the Navi 21 silicon, is mentioned in the patch. Previously, the Radeon Pro W5700 based on Navi 10 already implemented a USB-C (learn more about the USB port source). Now, with the dead standard, it comes to gaming graphics cards.
The NVIDIA RTX 2000 Turing architecture solution was purely USB-C based. NVIDIA implemented it to improve support for VR glasses, but the VirtualLink standard has never finished emerging. So much so that beyond connecting peripherals such as SSDs or Thunderbolt HUBs, it had no other uses. VirtualLink has not been of interest to the manufacturers of VR glasses and that they created it.
Source: TH
