Published in PC Hardware

AMD details CPUs and APUs for VR

by on12 February 2016


Quad core at least

AMD detailed eight of its CPUs and APUs can power a VR headset like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.


Most of the list is pretty bog standard – AMD’s 8-core FX-9590 and the 6-core FX-6350. However a the lower end AMD is also approving its 4-core A10-7870K APU and 4-core Athlon X4-870K CPU for VR, as well as two recently announced APUs. All of them AMD claim will offer “strong” VR performance.

The recommended GPU for VR on the Oculus is still a GeForce GTX 970 or Radeon R9 290. None of the chips run a lower clock speed than 3.9GHz or feature less than than four CPU cores.

The reason for four cores because DirectX 12 can’t get enough of them. Until DirectX 12 dual-core chips with Hyper-Threading would do the job in PC gaming. But DX12, offers performance benefits once games fully exploit it.

Oculus Rift said you need an Intel Core i5-4590 or higher to run VR so AMD’s list pretty much makes sense.

Last modified on 12 February 2016
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