AMD announces Sky graphics for cloud gaming capabilities

It looks like AMD is wanting to tackle the cloud gaming industry and take on the likes of OnLive. The company announced its new Sky series graphics at GDC 2013 this week, which is a new series of graphics chips being added on to the company's current Radeon line. The Sky series was built specifically with cloud gaming in mind.

The new Sky cards are built on AMD's Graphics Core Next architecture and use RapidFire technology in order to deliver the best cloud gaming experience possible. The series includes three enterprise-level graphics cards, with the top-tier model being the Sky 900, which packs in 3,584 stream processors, 6GB of GDDR5 memory, and a memory bandwidth of 480GB per second.

The plan with these cards is to deliver cloud gaming to a number of devices, including PCs (obviously), smartphones, tablets, and even Smart TVs. The company said that they're "working closely" with a handful of cloud gaming companies to build the best cloud-focused graphics cards out there. AMD announced partnerships with Otoy, Ubitus, G-Cluster, and CiiNow.

AMD's new cloud gaming initiative comes a couple of months after NVIDIA announced its GRID cloud gaming system at CES 2013, which will allow gamers to stream games over the interwebs to their computer and other mobile devices, including the new Project SHIELD from NVIDIA, which can play graphic-intensive games on a small handheld. AMD's plans for Sky are a bit scarce at this point, but we should be hearing more about it soon.