CPU for the DX12/Vulkan Gaming Era - 6 cores or 8?

[moonbogg]

What will be the ideal i7/Zen CPU with hyper threading? A six core or 8 core? I'm talking a CPU that will do best for the duration of the new API era, maybe the next 4 or 5 years. Lets leave the quads for the word processing/Excel crowd though, ok? They are dead once Zen shows up anyway. No one is buying an old boring quad when they can get a 6 or 8 core Zen for similar money.

So then. 6 or 8 cores? Don't say 10 cores. This is a PC master race thread, not a "sitting at the right hand of the 10 core father" thread.

 

[MajinCry]

The more ya got, the better. Software's only getting more parallel as the generations go by.

 

[jpiniero]

No one is buying an old boring quad when they can get a 6 or 8 core Zen for similar money.

Even if it's faster?

QC is plenty provided the HT is there.

 

[moonbogg]

Even if it's faster?

QC is plenty provided the HT is there.

Pshh, fine I guess. I'm still buying 6 cores or more next time. It makes me feel way more E-buff.

 

[krumme]

The consoles have 6 cores allocated for gaming and as that is a stretch and can go to 30fps in heavy scenes my take is yes minimum 6 big cores for the 60/90 min fps. Add 2 extra cores for video editing safeguarding and keeping that 120 fps in bf1

I agree i am bored to death about my i5 but dont really like to shell out 2k euro for an Intel bwe system. But foremost i want some games that really use dx12 and all the cores. Else it doesnt really make sense. High hopes for bf1 ! Bam !!!

 

[frozentundra123456]

What will be the ideal i7/Zen CPU with hyper threading? A six core or 8 core? I'm talking a CPU that will do best for the duration of the new API era, maybe the next 4 or 5 years. Lets leave the quads for the word processing/Excel crowd though, ok? They are dead once Zen shows up anyway. No one is buying an old boring quad when they can get a 6 or 8 core Zen for similar money.

So then. 6 or 8 cores? Don't say 10 cores. This is a PC master race thread, not a "sitting at the right hand of the 10 core father" thread.

Who says 8 core Zen will be the same price as a quad core intel? If it sucks, yes it will be. But if per core performance (IPC x clockspeed) is competitive with Haswell or BW, there is no way AMD will sell the equivalent of a thousand dollar Intel 8 core HEDT chip for 350.00.

Your question is impossible to answer anyway. If price is no object and overclocking is the same, then I suppose the answer is 8 core. But on a reasonable price/performance scale, I still think 6 cores with good per core performance will be the sweet spot.

I also think quad core i7 will be very close to HEDT or zen as well, even with DX12.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Where is the quad core option?

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

I have no experience with 8 cores and gaming, sold my quads 2-3rys ago. Love these 6 cores + HT for gaming. HT is great with DX11.1 and UT4 is implementing DX12 not sure but the game feels pretty good

 

[Shmee]

I have been fine with hexcores+HT for a while.

 

[cytg111]

Four

edit : the quads is a generation a head, better ipc and Hz'es ..

Ontop of that I dont understand the premise, if anything, Vulkan and DX12 lets you get away with a weaker CPU if anything.

 

[biostud]

Depends on the price. The premium cost of octa cores are better spend investing more in GPU power, while the hex cores only have a very small premium over quads

 

[hhhd1]

single core performance still matters in allot of scenarios, and 6 cores is likely to have the highest single core speed/trubo.

 

[prtskg]

I won't go more than 8 core for a while, i know that. 6 cores have good perf/$ but since i like strategy game, I voted for 8 core. Best for me in the new api.

 

[Mercennarius]

Its clear the future is aiming more and more towards multithreaded/multicore performance. As time goes on more cores will have a greater and greater impact.

I love my dual X5690s (24 threads FTW).

 

[mnewsham]

I have a 5820k at the moment that I feel should last me at least 3-4 years handily. At that point as long as I keep my motherboard in good shape I will probably pick up a Broadwell-E/Skylake-E based Xeon 10+ core for cheap on ebay.

 

[SAAA]

4 cores is and will be the sweet spot for a while, next logical step will be 6 rather than 8 exactly as now only if... Cannonlake brings 6-cores mainstream.
Why would you pick a quad Skylake now rather than a hex Haswell? Better IPC and frequency, also when overclocked, that usually overcomes core count.

So if hex becomes mainstream with the most up to date arch against older and slower 8-10 cores, then that will be the new sweet spot.

OFC if you have a grand to spend now on a 8 core well... go for it. Don't wait and enjoy 5 years of pure power while others are waiting for Zen, Cannonlake etc.

 

[mnewsham]

4 cores is and will be the sweet spot for a while, next logical step will be 6 rather than 8 exactly as now only if... Cannonlake brings 6-cores mainstream.
Why would you pick a quad Skylake now rather than a hex Haswell? Better IPC and frequency, also when overclocked, that usually overcomes core count.

So if hex becomes mainstream with the most up to date arch against older and slower 8-10 cores, then that will be the new sweet spot.

OFC if you have a grand to spend now on a 8 core well... go for it. Don't wait and enjoy 5 years of pure power while others are waiting for Zen, Cannonlake etc.

The way I saw it personally was a 6700k was $310 from my local microcenter. A 5820k was $320. The 5820k is obviously worse at stock clocks for single threaded performance (3.3GHz vs 4GHz) but both CPUs are unlocked, and both OC to similar levels (4.4-4.6GHz for the 5820k and 4.5-4.8Ghz for the 6700k) So single threaded performance comes MUCH closer once both are OC'd. The 5820k is only ~5-10% slower in single core performance, maybe 15% when including IPC improvements. But the 5820k still has those 2 more cores and double the L3 cache at it's disposal, not to mention X99 having quad channel memory, more PCIe lanes and potentially more robust upgrade path (2011-3 has 10 core CPUs already available and potentially higher core counts to come before we see another socket update)


Though for the most part I agree a good quad core is still the sweet spot overall, the 5820k is hard to ignore when you have a microcenter nearby however.

 

[DeathReborn]

I said 8 but it's a very broad 8 interpretation.

4+HT
8
8+HT

Any of those I would say are good safe bets and should in effect remove Dual Cores from the mainstream market (Core i3 Quad, Core i5 Quad+HT, Core i7 6-8+HT). Not gonna happen but one can want things...

 

[Ansau]

DX12 stops seeing benefits beyond 6 cores.

In fact, what really bottlenecks dx12 performance is the memory. L4 turns a 4c/4t cpu into a near 6c/12t, and it is the reason why the 5960x performs a little better than 5820k/5930k (a bit more cache):

The perfect cpu for DX12 is a 6c/12t with 128GB of EDRAM that could overclock as Skylake.

 

[prtskg]

DX12 stops seeing benefits beyond 6 cores.

The perfect cpu for DX12 is a 6c/12t with 128GB of EDRAM that could overclock as Skylake.

You should check Mercennarius result in Ashes of singularity. If I remember right, it scaled to 18 threads out of 24.

 

[tential]

I voted 8 cores.
10 cores is just too far of a leap, 8 cores/16 threads will be more than enough for awhile to come.

 

[bystander36]

If price is taken into consideration, go 6 cores.

 

[Lepton87]

The perfect cpu for DX12 is a 6c/12t with 128GB of EDRAM that could overclock as Skylake.

128GB would be way overkill I would make do with 1000x times less.
That would be what I really want. I would even pay those terrible BW-E prices if they included L4 cache. I would easily prefer that over the 10C 6950X.

 

[guskline]

I voted for 8 because (a) I have one and (b) from what I read, the largest consumer ZEN will be 8c/16t. I'll add a (c) the Broadwell E 10 core retail price? $1732

And I thought I paid a lot for an 8 core?

 

[zlejedi]

6700k currently

- Strongest 4 cores on the market which will still matter as not everything will get converted to DX12/Vulkan
- has HT so it benefits from games supporting more threads over i5 quads
- clocks better than Haswell-E and has higher IPC so that covers a bit of advantage 5820k might have when using 12 threads
- Z170 platform can run 2x gpu in SLI+ pci-ex x4 SSD without slowing down so lanes advantage of 5820k gets pointless

Slightly cheaper than 5820k (and much cheaper than 400$+ for Broadwell-E) and Z170 mobos are cheaper than X99