Vertigo Games Explains Core i7 Exclusivity For 'Arizona Sunshine'

[kcarbotte]

Vertigo Games faced harsh backlash from its customer base due to the perception of an exclusivity deal with Intel. We talked to the developer to get its side of the story.

Vertigo Games Explains Core i7 Exclusivity For 'Arizona Sunshine' : Read more

 

[blppt]

Theoretically, then, wouldnt this be a game that shines on an 8 core Bulldozer/Steamroller? It actually has 8 physical (granted, weaker) cores, so you would think that with the advanced physics on, 8 physical cores would trump 4 physical + 4 virtual. Not really sure why they make no mention of any AMD cpu in the system requirements.

 

[neblogai]

Cores on Bulldozer are only about half as strong as Intel cores. With Bulldozer, it would be difficult to run at high framerate required for VR, and not enough power for physics like on i5s. Zen, on the other hand, should be ~4 times the power than same clocked Bulldozer.

 

[hotsacoman]

I should have no problem running this on my 486. It can run Ski-Free at 60 fps and that's as close to real skiing as we're ever gonna get.

 

[stoned_ritual]

Something happened, Reddit in an outrage. News? Nope.

 

[bgunner]

Theoretically, then, wouldnt this be a game that shines on an 8 core Bulldozer/Steamroller? It actually has 8 physical (granted, weaker) cores, so you would think that with the advanced physics on, 8 physical cores would trump 4 physical + 4 virtual. Not really sure why they make no mention of any AMD cpu in the system requirements.

On this you are wrong. the AMD FX "8 core" CPU's are not actual 8 core CPU's. They are actually a 4 core with 2 treads running on each core just like Intel. AMD actually got sued for labeling its CPU's as 8 core CPU's when in fact they were not.

Due to Intel's core's higher IPC (Instructions Per Cycle) they are actually better than AMD's allowing for an I5 4 core CPU to actually beat the 8 core AMD CPU's in most work loads.

My point is that AMD's 8000 and 9000 series CPU's are not true 8 core CPU's but actually 4 physical cores and 4 logical cores. This is AMD marketing at its best.

 

[Sam Bittermann]

They may be technically right but they should have put it in the hands of the gamer to decide what works best and what doesn't. It was a poor decision at best on their part. You get ONE shot at release to get it right. When has restricted choices ever been a good thing.

 

[hellwig]

No physical? We've reverted more than a decade to when all physics had to be done on a cpu? Sounds idiotic to me.

 

[beshonk]

I don't see how this is different from an xbox one or PS4 exclusivity deal. Different hardware gets different games. I think exclusivity is stupid, since the developers can't market to their entire audience. Regardless, just because it's on PC doesn't mean there can't be exclusivity.

 

[kcarbotte]

Theoretically, then, wouldnt this be a game that shines on an 8 core Bulldozer/Steamroller? It actually has 8 physical (granted, weaker) cores, so you would think that with the advanced physics on, 8 physical cores would trump 4 physical + 4 virtual. Not really sure why they make no mention of any AMD cpu in the system requirements.

They did cut a deal with Intel for support, so I expect they didn't do any AMD platform testing.

 

[kcarbotte]

No physical? We've reverted more than a decade to when all physics had to be done on a cpu? Sounds idiotic to me.

Unity doesn't support GPU-based physics.

 

[kiniku]

Can they make a slower version for the AMD CPU gamers?

 

[blppt]

"On this you are wrong. the AMD FX "8 core" CPU's are not actual 8 core CPU's. They are actually a 4 core with 2 treads running on each core just like Intel. AMD actually got sued for labeling its CPU's as 8 core CPU's when in fact they were not."

Um, no. The new Zen (Ryzen) will have hyperthreading (SMT). But the Bulldozer/Steamroller 8 cores are actually 8 physical cores. Now, there is only 4 FPUs to share with those 8 cores, but unlike a quad i7, there actually is 8 physical integer cores. The HT 8 thread i7s have 4 virtual cores and 4 physical.

 

[blppt]

"Cores on Bulldozer are only about half as strong as Intel cores. With Bulldozer, it would be difficult to run at high framerate required for VR, and not enough power for physics like on i5s. Zen, on the other hand, should be ~4 times the power than same clocked Bulldozer. "

But compare this to what the dev said---they said they were unable to get the game to run smoothly on an i5 versus an i7. So, what this tells us is that having 4 physical and some number of virtual cores is required to run this game smoothly with the advanced physics (only difference between most i7s and equivalent i5s is the virtual extra 4 cores). This indicates that unlike most games, this particular engine is very, very well multithreaded, and the Core series advantage over competing FX-series chip has always been that games are usually less than optimized for more than 4 cores.

If we look at apps that take advantage of all 8 cores, suddenly the FX Bulldozers and Steamrollers dont look bad at all. For example: a benchmark like Cinebench R15 would give me roughly 730 on my 9590 at stock settings, compared to barely 700 for my old 3770K Ivy Bridge I also benched at the time. Likewise, running Geekbench 3 on my 9590 and current 4790K---the 9590 actually manages to put out a higher score for integer than the 4790K.

It doesnt translate well to real world performance, because this is a benchmark that nearly fully saturates all 8 cores, which almost never happens in games. My point in all this is that we have a game here which is apparently a rarity---a game that can be significantly impacted by having 4 extra addressable cores (whether virtual or physical), whereas most games I've come across favor 4 strong cores over a setup that has 8 physical cores that is roughly equivalent.

 

[kcarbotte]

Can they make a slower version for the AMD CPU gamers?

The game runs fine on any VR-ready PC, including AMD CPUs.
The advanced physics demand more than the average CPU, so you need an i7 to run the game with those features enabled.

 

[kcarbotte]

"Cores on Bulldozer are only about half as strong as Intel cores. With Bulldozer, it would be difficult to run at high framerate required for VR, and not enough power for physics like on i5s. Zen, on the other hand, should be ~4 times the power than same clocked Bulldozer. "

But compare this to what the dev said---they said they were unable to get the game to run smoothly on an i5 versus an i7. So, what this tells us is that having 4 physical and some number of virtual cores is required to run this game smoothly with the advanced physics (only difference between most i7s and equivalent i5s is the virtual extra 4 cores). This indicates that unlike most games, this particular engine is very, very well multithreaded, and the Core series advantage over competing FX-series chip has always been that games are usually less than optimized for more than 4 cores.

If we look at apps that take advantage of all 8 cores, suddenly the FX Bulldozers and Steamrollers dont look bad at all. For example: a benchmark like Cinebench R15 would give me roughly 730 on my 9590 at stock settings, compared to barely 700 for my old 3770K Ivy Bridge I also benched at the time. Likewise, running Geekbench 3 on my 9590 and current 4790K---the 9590 actually manages to put out a higher score for integer than the 4790K.

It doesnt translate well to real world performance, because this is a benchmark that nearly fully saturates all 8 cores, which almost never happens in games. My point in all this is that we have a game here which is apparently a rarity---a game that can be significantly impacted by having 4 extra addressable cores (whether virtual or physical), whereas most games I've come across favor 4 strong cores over a setup that has 8 physical cores that is roughly equivalent.

I intend to test this theory soon.
I don't have any skylake processors in the VR lab right now, but I do have a few AMD processors to test the game with.

 

[quilciri]

On this you are wrong. the AMD FX "8 core" CPU's are not actual 8 core CPU's. They are actually a 4 core with 2 treads running on each core just like Intel. AMD actually got sued for labeling its CPU's as 8 core CPU's when in fact they were not.

He was mostly right. You are mostly wrong here. AMD's 8xxx chips have 4 of what's known as "modules" Each Module has two CPU cores, two integer units and a single floating point unit. An 8xxx chip has 4 modules, for a total of 8 cores, 8 integer units, and 4 FP units. The only reason they're not called *true* 8 core chips is because of that shared FP unit. AMD doesn't use anything like hyperthreading on it's current chips. The upcoming Zen (Ryzen) chips will, however.

If the game runs better on an I7 because it makes significant use of 8 threads, then it should perform well on the FX-8xxx. A single core on an 8320/8350 performs in the ballpark of a hyper-threaded thread on a I7.

 

[IndignantSkeptic]

Who the hell puts games on CPUs instead of GPUs nowadays? That's where they went wrong.

 

[cats_Paw]

"We created bonus features"
If those are not available in other CPU compositions, then its like trusting a meth addict with your ... ah you get the point.

 

[Olle P]

Who the hell puts games on CPUs instead of GPUs nowadays? That's where they went wrong.

Nothing wrong. They use the GPU as much as possible, but that will only suffice to provide the required graphics and leave no room for physics computing.
For the physics they opted to put that on the CPU rather than demanding a second GPU to do those calculations.
(Or the "recommended" GPU would have to be the latest Titan.)

 

[scolaner]

Who the hell puts games on CPUs instead of GPUs nowadays? That's where they went wrong.

Nothing wrong. They use the GPU as much as possible, but that will only suffice to provide the required graphics and leave no room for physics computing.
For the physics they opted to put that on the CPU rather than demanding a second GPU to do those calculations.
(Or the "recommended" GPU would have to be the latest Titan.)

There are efforts in the VR world to leverage CPUs to help handle the intense demands of VR titles.

 

[Giroro]

If Vertigo Games knew how to properly optimize a game, then they wouldn't be using a starter engine like unity.
Why do they require an overpowered processor? Because they don't want to pay for a software engineer that understands how the drivers running their store-bought engine work.

 

[razor512]

Who the hell puts games on CPUs instead of GPUs nowadays? That's where they went wrong.

Their limitation was that the game engine did not support GPU physics, thus they were forced to put it all on the CPU. If you look at CPU vs GPU physics calculations, the GPU will be multiple orders of magnitude faster, the difference is larger than CPU VS GPU rendering of 3D graphics. This is why for a while now, when they do benchmarks of physx enabled games with 1 GPU, and again with 2 GPUs not in SLI, so that one can be dedicated to physics, the performance difference is often very slight.

If you run GPUz, you will often see that for most VR titles, they cards in the GTX 970 range, will often not even reach full load, thus if the game engine supported GPU physics acceleration, there would in most cases, be additional headroom to handle it, and if not, they could simply choose automatically based on the hardware, whether to use the CPU or GPU for physics.

PS, most game developers, significantly overestimate the requirements for their game for 2 major reasons.

The first, is because they have to account for the user whose PC takes 15 minutes to boot because it has 200 startup items and half the RAM is being used on them.

The second reason, is because people will be more pissed off if they buy a game with a system that meats the minimum requirements, but the game ends up being unplayable at all settings due to variety of things that are causing reduced performance (running a crappy AV, or other random things).

 

[Faux_Grey]

Can tell you right now my i5 will trump most non-overclocked i7s.

This entire issue is stupid.

Does that mean my 1st gen i7 @ 1.9Ghz will play the game perfectly, but my 4690K @ 4.5Ghz wont? Lel!

 

[quilciri]

Can tell you right now my i5 will trump most non-overclocked i7s.

This entire issue is stupid.

Does that mean my 1st gen i7 @ 1.9Ghz will play the game perfectly, but my 4690K @ 4.5Ghz wont? Lel!

You might want to read the whole article.