Hades Canyon

Today's VR headsets need a pretty cutting edge graphics card. The Occulus hardware specs continue to evolve, but basically you need a high end gaming card like a GTX1080Ti for decent playback. This is problematic for a mobile solution as many laptops don't have this level of graphics. There are a couple laptop solutions that fit the bill, but are fairly heavy weight laptops. For my current needs a semi-portable solution would be OK. I believe it was at SIGGRAPH that I first saw the announcement for the new Intel Hades Canyon NUC. The NUC line is a great compact form factor PC that I have used for various installations in the past. This NUC is supercharged with lots of ports and most importantly the new AMD Vega GPU. Check out the hardware specs here: https://amzn.to/2BVRjjW

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SETUP

I went ahead and purchased one of these for my testing, and also an upcoming display project. Of course I want it to dual boot Windows and Linux which presented a few small hurdles. Support for the AMD GPU is relatively new (in 2018) so requires a little extra work on the Linux side, here are the steps I followed:

I followed this rundown on installing FC 28 on NUC,

  1. Install Fedora Core 28. I boot using the netinst USB, and then build up from the minimal install the packages required.
  2. Had to get the latest kernel 4.19 from rawhide repo.
  3. Run Cinebench to see what kind of performance I can get

I used this NUC for the "HUD demo" at Supercomputing 2018. Performance was rock solid, it ran the Unreal Engine application I built non-stop for the 4 days of the show. I will say it runs pretty hot, I had it in an enclosed area and could have used a little external fan to keep the air moving. Overall a great little solution to power a graphics intensive application.