You’ll Need An Intel i7 To Unlock The Full Experience Of 'Arizona Sunshine'

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Nice. I have an i7, and am willing to upgrade to a faster one if it can improve VR games. I like that we're not winding up with game quality lowered to what the minimum Vive specs can handle.

Now I want fan interfaces so I can feel in-game wind in the real world.
 
"countless zombies from all directions", oh the horror!
I'm generally to timid for horror games, and haven't got any VR gear, but I'll certainly give them an A+ for going the extra mile and letting the i7 shine!
More studios should push the envelope that way!
 
So no matter how many cores or threads an AMD processor has, the "full experience" won't be available? If that is the case, then it is not a thread issue but a proprietary one. If, on the other hand, it will give a "full experience" with some high thread AMD processors, then the article should point this out. Either way, important information is missing from this article.
 


You always take a chance when you settle for an AMD processor, but in this case you might be OK.
Recommended System Requirements:

OS: Windows 10
Processor: Intel Core i7 6700K equivalent or greater
Memory: 16 GB RAM
Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 980 / AMD equivalent or greater
DirectX: Version 12
Storage: T.B.A GB available space
Additional Notes: VR Headset required, 2x USB 3.0 ports
 
In general, there is the "V" and the "R" in VR... The V is enabled with the 3D virtual world of the high quality HMD... This can be done to consume photos, videos, etc. and for that, not that difficult of a challenge for the HW, unless you are creating said VR content, then you can easily bring the most advanced HW to it's knees...

The R in VR is the harder one to get right for gaming interactivity, etc... Takes an immense amount of CPU & Gfx. computational power to do all of the physics and the triangle rendering to get a truly realistic and interactive experience (Also want a fast memory and drive subsystem, etc. to help feed the CPU/GPU).

General advice is to make sure you build or buy the absolute best CPU, GPU and SSD that you can afford... This is just now getting "REAL"... Pun intentional... Save your pennies and plan ahead.
 
I'm always wary of anything that might be "proprietary" why I don't own crApple stuff and why I'm always avoiding games that seem prorietarily (is that a word?) optimised for anything other than multi core/thread or industry api's aka dx12/vulkan
 
As I understand the optimizations in Arizona Sunshine, they are designed to take advantage of the multiple cores and threads of CPU to handle more of the physics loads that great VR requires... Thus, offloading the GPU to process the triangles and move the bottleneck from GPU and better balance the VR platform... This was not Intel driving proprietary solutions, just ensuring the Volkswagon Beatle with the FORD V8 is actually a Shelby GT 500... Maybe my analogy holds, maybe it doesn't, but you can't really turn a Volkswagon Beatle into a Shelby with engine alone... Thus I am saying you cannot have truly great VR with GPU alone... Trust me, we've looked at GTX1080 performance with Core i5 and with Core i7 with these features turned on and it's a major difference... The optimizations should run on some of the multi core AMD products, but please don't be confused, CPU is critical to the VR experience, especially those games where the "R" is being pushed to limits... Buy the best CPU, GPU & SSD you can... More games will optimize this way in future... This stuff is true MIPS sucking apps that have been promised for years from all corners of the tech world...
 
"Intel Core i7 6700K equivalent or greater"

The problem here is that there is no consumer-level AMD cpu that is an equivalent of a 6700K, lol.

I, for one, second the "proprietary Intel" theory here. If this game is all about more than 4 core performance, it would seem that finally AMD's FX series has a game perfectly suited for it. So their explanation doesnt really make a whole lot of sense.
 
Anyway.... What's really cool is that the game developers are now using VR as a reason to drive the optimizations for more and better performing cores... The experience is really incredible and everyone wins, especially those of us that love to put together really great, no compromise gaming PCs... Try that on your Samsung GEAR VR... Or not!
 
If its a feature list you can control in a menu, then no big deal. If there is "if (i7 detected) then {turn on more crap}" in the code then thats a horrible decision.

I hope they arent dumb enough to make it i7 only. Its not an intel/amd thing, its the fact that that kind of code is very fragile, it wont age well at all(ie your new faster i9 wont be detected and the stuff will be turned off).
 
I thought it was obvious from the article, that the requirement on the CPU side was the ability to execute more threads in parallell (more cores), in this case Intel hypertreading. If it was some proprietary Intel tech an i5 from an equivelent generation would have sufficed, since the i5 and i7 are very much the same processors from a design/production perspective (I guess they still are since the i7 isn't a geniune 8 core design, but has just enough resources set aside to juggle 8 threads, thus HT)

The author (Kevin) should take note that, if Intel is mentioned in an article, AMD has to be mentioned too, so that the discussion following the article doesn't go astray...
 


You just answered your own question here "The problem here is that there is no consumer-level AMD cpu that is an equivalent of a 6700K"

An 8 core AMD cpu released in 2012 can not compete with a 4 core intel cpu released this year. It couldn't even compete with the i7's from 2012. The i7 just has much more horsepower under the hood, its not a matter of anything being proprietary.
 
Why not just use the GPU to handle the physics calculations?
A $100 GPU can crush a $500 CPU when it comes to physics, as they are just more optimized at the hardware level to handle those calculations.

If there is the potential for a GPU bottleneck when you throw the physics on it, then it is totally practical for most gamers with a VR ready system to toss in a lower end second GPU, and just have it handle the physics, and then for laptop users, it can then move to its core i7 requirement.
 


Actually, if you look at benchmarks that make full use of the 8 cores of an FX processor, the FX's hold up pretty well with recent generation (Haswell/Devils Canyon) i7s. The problem is that it is very rare for a PC game to utlilize 8 cores significantly, so Intel, with its HUGE per-core advantage usually dominates. Skylake does have slightly better IPC than Devil's Canyon, but its not THAT much.

Since the i7's general advantage over an equivalent i5 is just hyperthreading, that would seem to help 8 core FXs as well, because otherwise there would be no need for an i7 versus an i5 for these "special effects"
 


Most of the benchmarks I've seen on heavily threaded productivity software place the FX 8350 at similar performance to the i5 6600k at stock speeds, even the FX 9590 only manages to pull off some marginal wins (~5%) over the 6600k. The i7 is even faster in those applications. The FX 8350's higher core count over even a current i5 only seems to help in WinRAR and 7Zip compression and decompression, and in synthetic benchmarks like Passmark. A big part of the problem with the FX CPUs is the shared floating point resources can really slow them down if what you're doing isn't using purely integer math.

Secondly, higher core count doesn't necessarily help depending on the game engine. You can see an example in Overwatch, there is a big enough framerate difference between the i5s and i7s that indicates the game engine can use more than 4 threads and that it does benefit from hyperthreading even on a quad core. However, all of AMD's FX processors perform virtually the same with only slight variations that line up with the differences in clockspeed between the different FX models, the game doesn't seem to scale beyond 4 physical cores period. The hexacore and up Intel chips also perform about the same as the quad core i7s, maybe even slightly slower due to lower clockspeed. Whether Arizona Sunshine will work in a similar way remains to be seen.
 
If the video provides an accurate depiction of the game then wow...welcome to 2003 graphics. VR or not...the game doesn't look very good...certainly not good enough for me to start upgrading hardware...
 
I was gonna say it's a bit lame when VR titles are (so far) poorer graphics etc that they ask for a processor requirement... but I guess there's a reason for that: VR games are very taxing i.e. two 3d scenes, having to be rendered at very high frame rates. I would assume there's still quite a lot of room for optimization and as more and more the hardcore 3d programming savants focus on VR they will be able to squeeze more and more performance and more and more detail/realism... but understandable that certain things might just not be possible in VR with current hardware (e.g. before Rift was released, I was naively assuming we'd get titles like The Division in VR off the bat and was as simple programming wise as just rendering two scenes rather than one... I guess it's not that easy huh!)

Kinda talking out my a&^ a little bit here, but VR takes off it will surely be a big "push factor" for Intel/AMD/Nvidia to improve their hardware... i.e. I get the feeling in our current world Nvidia/AMD are like "oi! Developers! Check out what our GPU's can do: make use of it!" ... but with VR it will be the developers calling out "oi! Nvidia/AMD! We wanna make this sweet game: give us better hardware!"
 
The 8 actual AMD FX integer cores are better that 4 Intel integer cores.
The 4 actual AMD FX floating point are worse than 4 Intel floating point cores.

Hyperthreading is largely a marketing gimmick, especially in video games, since it increases latency, which is not good.

The truth of how the game perform really depends on what sort of processing they're doing. Floating point is heavily used for geometry but integer processing is heavily used for AI and most everything else. So benchmarking really is required to work out the reality.
 
Doom3 had me creeped out to the point I was leery to continue the game. I think high end VR with zombies would be too much for this old heart of mine.
 
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