CPU; # of threads matter much?

Arguendo

Volunteer Moderator
Arguendo
Just a quick question about CPUs for VR.

I currently have an i5-6600k, which I am looking at upgrading slightly, as I am not inclined to buy a new motherboard as well at this time.
Looking at the i7-6700k vs i5-7600k and their comparison here, I am unsure what would be considered the best option for VR. The i5 has some aspects where it performs better, while the i7 has others. Which matter the most for VR?

The reason for comparing these is that they are quite comparable in price. I could always go for the i7-7700k (which is max what my motherboard can take), but for comparison reasons the two above make more sense. Additionally I am running a 1060 6GB GPU, which I think will bottleneck if I start going for 8 or 9 gen. So going beyond 7gen would pretty much force me to buy a completely new pc, sans harddrives, and I am not there yet :eek:

All thoughts are appreciated.
 

-VR- Max Factor

-VR- Max Factor
Arguendo said:
Just a quick question about CPUs for VR.

I currently have an i5-6600k, which I am looking at upgrading slightly, as I am not inclined to buy a new motherboard as well at this time.
Looking at the i7-6700k vs i5-7600k and their comparison here, I am unsure what would be considered the best option for VR. The i5 has some aspects where it performs better, while the i7 has others. Which matter the most for VR?

The reason for comparing these is that they are quite comparable in price. I could always go for the i7-7700k (which is max what my motherboard can take), but for comparison reasons the two above make more sense. Additionally I am running a 1060 6GB GPU, which I think will bottleneck if I start going for 8 or 9 gen. So going beyond 7gen would pretty much force me to buy a completely new pc, sans harddrives, and I am not there yet :eek:

All thoughts are appreciated.
Click to expand...

Personally I don't think it will do that much. I was running an i5 2500k (with a reasonable overclock) for a long time even when using an oculus rift with it without much issue. When playing on a flat screen at 1080p, in space I would get 200fps (which I think is the limit) with my AMD Fury card which is a bit old now.

Obviously the more threads you have, the better it will be and every FPS can help with VR.
 
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Shinji Ikari

Shinji Ikari
Having more threads helps but only so much, gaming is not an application that takes advantage of many threads. If you stream then it might make sense as you can split the load of streaming to some threads while keeping others running the game. Games take more advantage of core clocks.

I'd have at most 6 cores in a gaming CPU but IMO 4 is enough.

Edit: Now that I have seen both of them, I simply don't see the benefit of the 7600K, it has less threads and it has a lower clock speed compared to the 6700K.
 
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MickyG1982

M
If you are planning on VR then the GTX 1060 is already going to be the bottleneck, even with the 6600k.

That's not to say you won't see an improvement by upgrading the CPU but it won't be anywhere near as much as if you had a 1080 (or Ti) installed.
 

Aekero

A
Arguendo said:
Just a quick question about CPUs for VR.

I currently have an i5-6600k, which I am looking at upgrading slightly, as I am not inclined to buy a new motherboard as well at this time.
Looking at the i7-6700k vs i5-7600k and their comparison here, I am unsure what would be considered the best option for VR. The i5 has some aspects where it performs better, while the i7 has others. Which matter the most for VR?

The reason for comparing these is that they are quite comparable in price. I could always go for the i7-7700k (which is max what my motherboard can take), but for comparison reasons the two above make more sense. Additionally I am running a 1060 6GB GPU, which I think will bottleneck if I start going for 8 or 9 gen. So going beyond 7gen would pretty much force me to buy a completely new pc, sans harddrives, and I am not there yet :eek:

All thoughts are appreciated.
Click to expand...

just upgraded last week from a 6600k to a 7700k, and the difference in elite vr is massive. Literally going from pegged cpu, throttled, problems running dash, to 60% usage with plenty of headroom. It didn't make a lot of difference for games that were native vr like robo recall, but as an added bonus it was a huge boost for 4-6k videos as well. As someone else mentioned though, your 1060 might be the bottleneck already. I'm running on a 1080 and the cpu for elite was definitely the bottleneck though.
 
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-VR- Max Factor

-VR- Max Factor
Gregg Rulz ok said:
Till you hit the refresh rate of your VR device.
Click to expand...

Yeah. But the refresh rate is 90 (most of the time) and you will want 90fps as much as possible. The worst areas are stations, planet surfaces and rings (these use a lot of CPU) where FPS can take a hit.

ED is a multi threaded application and will use as many threads as it can. I have an i5 8600 now which has 6 cores and zero threads. That should be enough for a while.
 

Shinji Ikari

Shinji Ikari
Max Factor said:
Yeah. But the refresh rate is 90 (most of the time) and you will want 90fps as much as possible. The worst areas are stations, planet surfaces and rings (these use a lot of CPU) where FPS can take a hit.

ED is a multi threaded application and will use as many threads as it can. I have an i5 8600 now which has 6 cores and zero threads. That should be enough for a while.
Click to expand...

6 cores and 0 threads? You sure?
 

Shinji Ikari

Shinji Ikari
MickyG1982 said:
If you are planning on VR then the GTX 1060 is already going to be the bottleneck, even with the 6600k.

That's not to say you won't see an improvement by upgrading the CPU but it won't be anywhere near as much as if you had a 1080 (or Ti) installed.
Click to expand...

I also agree, ED is more of a graphical intensive game.
 

Morbad

Morbad
ED seems to run at least two render threads, plus as many worker threads as it's set to (in the appconfig.xml), within reason. The render threads can be quite demanding, but most of the workers are not and they will happily run on a few fast logical cores.

Some graphics drivers are multi-threaded themselves and VR typically mandates at least one extra render thread for the additional viewport.

Four logical processors is already borderline for non-VR ED and is, IMO insufficient for VR. I would highly recommend a quad-core with SMT at the low-end, and ideally a six or eight core part (with or without SMT).

Arguendo said:
I currently have an i5-6600k, which I am looking at upgrading slightly, as I am not inclined to buy a new motherboard as well at this time.
Looking at the i7-6700k vs i5-7600k
Click to expand...

The 6700K is an actual upgrade, the 7600K not so much.
 

Bombcrater

B
The thing most people miss about games in VR is that you have the game, the graphics driver and the VR processing layer all competing for CPU time. That's why extra threads matter more than they do for non VR games. In my experience you really need a 4C/8T or 6C/6T processor to have a chance of avoiding a CPU bottleneck. A 4C/4T chip will struggle, even if it is a relatively modern one.
 

CMDR_JAMESONS

C
My i5 6600k at 4.6Ghz bottlenecks in VR in demanding environments such as stations. I’ve been wondering whether to upgrade the CPU to a i7 7700k (max my mobo will take) or whether to upgrade the mono and go for an i9 9900k. Currently running a 980ti but thinking about an upgrade to RTX... maybe... prices seem OTT! GPU currently bottlenecks in most environments other than stations.
 

-VR- Max Factor

-VR- Max Factor
Gregg Rulz ok said:
I could (and I did) think about that, but then I would have assumed what you meant. I'd also like a source for your claim about ED being a multi thread program.
Click to expand...

I use a program that tracks what happens on my PC. ED will use all 6 cores. There have been others that have said it uses all 8 threads.
 

Shinji Ikari

Shinji Ikari
Max Factor said:
I use a program that tracks what happens on my PC. ED will use all 6 cores. There have been others that have said it uses all 8 threads.
Click to expand...

After launching the game and opening the resources monitor (no 3rd party software needed), I did see a very similar usage across all 8 threads of my i6700HQ.
 
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Arguendo

Volunteer Moderator
Arguendo
Aekero said:
just upgraded last week from a 6600k to a 7700k, and the difference in elite vr is massive. Literally going from pegged cpu, throttled, problems running dash, to 60% usage with plenty of headroom. It didn't make a lot of difference for games that were native vr like robo recall, but as an added bonus it was a huge boost for 4-6k videos as well. As someone else mentioned though, your 1060 might be the bottleneck already. I'm running on a 1080 and the cpu for elite was definitely the bottleneck though.
Click to expand...
The 1060 was the bottleneck until I went VR. Now it's completely opposite. My GPU is running happily at 60-70% (iirc) while my CPU overclocked at 4.4GHz is maxing out frequently. I had the CPU overclocked to 4.5GHz for a while, with similar results.
So yeah, I agree with non-VR that the 1060 is a bottleneck. With VR that doesn't seem to be the case anymore though.
Note: I run atleast EDMC, VA, and Discord in the background, and sometimes EDDI and EDEngineer as well. That may be the straw that is breaking the camel's back, as I notice my VA commands (macro, non-voice) are really struggling to keep up in busy instances.

Gregg Rulz ok said:
I also agree, ED is more of a graphical intensive game.
Click to expand...
See above. That seems true for non-VR, but it appears to change once you go VR.


General: Seems like the i7 will be my best bet, whether I go 6700k or 7700k. Good to know. Thanks!
 

TorTorden_VR

T
Windows will rotate load across threads, balancing load across all threads obfuscating this a lot.

That said the boost in performance when I upgraded from an i7 4790k to an i7 8700k was massive.

Modern game engines are highly multithreaded and elite is one of them the old adage that gamers still cling to today, of clock frequency over core count hasn't been really true for almost a decade now.

But gaming isn't a one or the other affair.
You benefit from both, so what you want for VR is many fast cores, picking a CPU with fast clocks but few threads will limit, a CPU with a lot of cores but a slow clock will also limit.

On top of this there is the question of hyper threading.
At this point I suspect there isn't much gained from it for games.
But I don't think there any penalties either, not enough to consider disabling it.

Mostly because I'm lazy and I need a good reason to change out of default settings.
 
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