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AMD-Opteron-A1100

Earlier this week, Oculus opened pre-orders for systems and configurations that it believes will evangelize an adequate VR feel. Overall, information technology's probably all-time if consumers hold off on pre-ordering VR equipment — only since we've spent most of our time discussing the GPU side of the equation, the CPU deserves some love besides.

Jason Evangelho of Forbes saturday down with AMD to talk virtually its processor back up for VR and whether the company'due south FX and APU families can drive headsets like the Oculus Rift. The expert news is, they absolutely can, even if the current version of the Oculus hardware tester claims otherwise.

Capture3Originally, AMD told Forbes that in that location were a variety of AMD FX processors that could handle VR, equally well every bit some of the highest-clocked APU processors. The company has since walked dorsum its APU claims, notwithstanding, and is now saying that only the FX chips accept been validated. If y'all have an eight-core or half dozen-core AMD CPU with a base clock no lower than iii.9GHz, you should be skilful to get with VR.

The fact that AMD is still validating VR on its APUs doesn't mean those chips can't handle the applied science, but it may be difficult for them to do so. Even AMD'southward upcoming A10-7890K, with a supposed 4.1GHz base clock and 4.3GHz heave clock isn't all that powerful compared to Intel's Core family. Since AMD CPUs can't friction match the single-threaded functioning of Intel fries, which is why AMD positions its multi-core offerings confronting Intel processors with a lower cadre count. According to Oculus' recommendations, the minimum Intel scrap you should use is a Cadre i5-4590. That's a 3.3GHz quad-cadre with a 3.7GHz Turbo clock, 6MB of L2 cache, and no Hyper-Threading.

AMD's six and eight-core processors leverage multi-threading to counter Intel'south strong single-thread functioning, but a quad-core APU only has four threads to work with and can't match an i5, core-for-core.

If AMD does manage to validate its APUs, it could mean that we'll run across broader compatibility than Oculus is currently recommending. If a quad-core APU tin can handle VR, older CPUs ought to be able to do and then also. Heck, nosotros may even see some Nehalem-era hardware uniform, though I don't know how far nosotros can button that particular envelope. And of course, information technology'll be of import to examination hardware from both companies to make sure older chips can actually handle the workload. VR back up for AMD could air current up depending on DX12 support, too, since DX12 relieves pressure level on CPU architectures.

I doubtable nosotros will find that the Intel Core i5-4590 was a very robust minimum recommendation — and to be fair, that's the kind of minimum recommendation we like. I'm sure at some betoken, somebody volition write a demo that lets you employ VR on an erstwhile AMD K6 or a TRS-lxxx — hackers tend to be basics like that.