Off Topic Thread V2.0

Cuddlesworth

wheresmahbombs wrote: »

With Raja Koduri in Intel now, I suspect that Intel's foray into the discrete GPU market might be of similar quality to Vega.

You know Vega and Polaris are amazing cards in their own right, they just don't excel at gaming.

BloodBath wrote: »

The most interesting part is they will allegedly be using multi core module design like Ryzen cpu's. Multiple smaller gpu modules connected with some sort of interposer.

Amd were supposed to have had a big lead in this area with their own MCM design still some way off. Probably around late 2020 as well since Navi will not be using it.

Interesting times ahead. More competition should be good.

Hardware wise, multi-gpu seems pretty easy for the two main Vendors to do.

The issue is that the main driver of GPU's is currently gaming. And games have longer and longer development cycles, falling further and further behind the hardware tech. Jesus, DX12 has been out for 2 years and the list of true properly implemented DX12 games is pretty much zero.

TerrorFirmer

What's really interesting and I didn't hear much talk about is the performance of the NUC's that have the Intel CPU with the integrated Vega graphics.

The benchmarks genuinely blew me away, seems to perform similar to something like GTX1050ti-GTX1060.

BloodBath

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

You know Vega and Polaris are amazing cards in their own right, they just don't excel at gaming.



Hardware wise, multi-gpu seems pretty easy for the two main Vendors to do.

The issue is that the main driver of GPU's is currently gaming. And games have longer and longer development cycles, falling further and further behind the hardware tech. Jesus, DX12 has been out for 2 years and the list of true properly implemented DX12 games is pretty much zero.

The tools for making games have got better and better. If anything it should reduce game development time. It's entirely dependent on the game size/quality and the team size/quality.

DX12 is just a buzz word. The current engines like UE4 are capable of scaling far beyond anything we see in current games even with DX11. We are still very much limited by hardware. Improving visuals is actually quite easy.

We're going to see a shift to ray traced lighting, reflections and shadows within the next few years. The engines are already capable of it. Most of the hardware however is not.

Here's an example of a real time rendered ray traced scene with ue4. The amazing part of this is it's actually less time consuming to achieve this higher quality as there is no need for traditional lightmass baking and all the tedium that comes with that. In terms of a complete game this alone could save thousands of hours of development time.

Cuddlesworth

BloodBath wrote: »

The tools for making games have got better and better. If anything it should reduce game development time. It's entirely dependent on the game size/quality and the team size/quality.

Not sure where you are going with this, of course games get better and better as hardware and software get better. But you must have noticed the progression curve has dropped significantly in the last few years.

BloodBath wrote: »

DX12 is just a buzz word. The current engines like UE4 are capable of scaling far beyond anything we see in current games even with DX11.

DX12 is a set of programming API's. Notably with DX12 is the low level API's giving game engines more direct access to the hardware and the ability to render effectively with multi-gpu without driver reliance. That's not a buzzword, its how gaming on Windows system works.

The timeline from game engine, to game usage for new API's is slow. Real damm slow.

BloodBath wrote: »

We are still very much limited by hardware. Improving visuals is actually quite easy.

Most things with computers are limited by hardware.

BloodBath wrote: »

We're going to see a shift to ray traced lighting, reflections and shadows within the next few years. The engines are already capable of it. Most of the hardware however is not.

Here's an example of a real time rendered ray traced scene with ue4. The amazing part of this is it's actually less time consuming to achieve this higher quality as there is no need for traditional lightmass baking and all the tedium that comes with that. In terms of a complete game this alone could save thousands of hours of development time.

Real time 3d ray tracing demos have been around for longer then I have had a computer.

BloodBath

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

Not sure where you are going with this, of course games get better and better as hardware and software get better. But you must have noticed the progression curve has dropped significantly in the last few years.



DX12 is a set of programming API's. Notably with DX12 is the low level API's giving game engines more direct access to the hardware and the ability to render effectively with multi-gpu without driver reliance. That's not a buzzword, its how gaming on Windows system works.

The timeline from game engine, to game usage for new API's is slow. Real damm slow.



Most things with computers are limited by hardware.



Real time 3d ray tracing demos have been around for longer then I have had a computer.

Not sure if I misunderstood you but you said game development times are falling behind the tech which is simply not true. DX12 offers very little over DX11 which is why it hasn't seen large uptake.

Much like DX10 it will be skipped over by most as it doesn't offer much outside of some optimisations for large draw call scenes which are inconsistent at best. There are other easier ways of optimising this already.

Progression has slowed because of the consoles falling far behind the power of PC's and in general your average gaming PC is around or even below console level. Not many developers want to push the boundaries of high end hardware capabilities as it just does not make sense appeasing less than 1% of the market.

I know that ray tracing is nothing new. The point is that's on a current engine, running in real time on current hardware. Granted very high end quad gpu hardware but with optimisations that can run on a single 1080ti. We're 5 years tops away from being able to do something similar with mainstream hardware.

The push for higher resolutions and frame rates has also stalled graphical improvements as the majority of the gains we have had in the last 5+ years have gone towards powering that.

EoinHef

Going to make an order on amazon tonight and looking at motherboards. They dont seem to have stock of most AM4 X470 boards?
They are all on pre order as they havent been released according to amazon!

Thought they would be well in stock by now:(

Lu Tze

Right, threw up a 2GB 750ti on adverts, a single fan model but it's a large fan (100mm). What's a reasonable asking/acceptable offer?

TerrorFirmer

People seem happy to still pay €70 or so for them I think, even though a new GT1030 2GB (GDDR5 model) is almost identical with newer features/lower power, etc!

Lu Tze

TerrorFirmer wrote: »

People seem happy to still pay €70 or so for them I think, even though a new GT1030 2GB (GDDR5 model) is almost identical with newer features/lower power, etc!

Cheers, just checked out the prices for new GT1030s, they seem to be just under £70. I think ill update the add to €60

ED E

€450 Mobo: Crap preamp/DAC
€40 Keyboard: Less crap preamp/DAC
€9 USB SC: Brilliant

Note to self, less money = moar quality



Its no O2 stack but the FiiO Sabrent Combo is neat and very very effective.

K.O.Kiki

TerrorFirmer wrote: »

People seem happy to still pay €70 or so for them I think, even though a new GT1030 2GB (GDDR5 model) is almost identical with newer features/lower power, etc!

Lu Tze wrote: »

Cheers, just checked out the prices for new GT1030s, they seem to be just under £70. I think ill update the add to €60

750Ti outperforms GT 1030.

Robert ninja

Watched this today. Great history of Nvidia by adored tv.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0L3OTZ13Os

TerrorFirmer

K.O.Kiki wrote: »

750Ti outperforms GT 1030.

Well I said almost identical, there's about 10% between them, and at this point you wouldn't be buying either to play AAA titles, more stuff like Fortnite, Overwatch, DOTA, etc at high settings.

Given the GT1030 uses half the power, has newer features, etc, I'd take a new one with warranty over a used 750Ti for the same price.

z0oT

A preview of an MSI X399 Motherboard for Threadripper 2 at Computex. It's got one hell of an amount of phases in the power delievery. Something like 250W to 300W seems to be what people are thinking it'll end up at.


Given that, I'd imagine the non-turbo clk speed is at least around 3GHz. 32 cores at 3GHz with a turbo of 4GHz would certainly be interesting.

savemejebus

Curious as to what do you guys and gals think a fair price for this HTPC would be?

I5 2500
Be quiet modular 430w psu
MSI m-atx board
8gb ddr3 ram
Scythe big shuriken cpu cooler
Silverstone Grandia GD09 HTPC case
Dvbsky dual dub-s tuner card
128gb ssd
1tb hdd
Genuine win 8.1 or 10
R5450 passive gfx

Xenoronin

savemejebus wrote: »

Curious as to what do you guys and gals think a fair price for this HTPC would be?

I5 2500
Be quiet modular 430w psu
MSI m-atx board
8gb ddr3 ram
Scythe big shuriken cpu cooler
Silverstone Grandia GD09 HTPC case
Dvbsky dual dub-s tuner card
128gb ssd
1tb hdd
Genuine win 8.1 or 10
R5450 passive gfx

Probably around 300-400€ range.

TerrorFirmer

I think in the current market you'd find it impossible to get that. The 2nd hand market has slowed down dramatically over the past 12 months (aside from the GPU craze) and prices on 2nd hands parts and machines have dropped hugely.

I'd say you will find it hard to get about €250 for that one. It's a great time to be a buyer but not so much a seller. I've seen a few 4th gen i5 based machines with GTX970's go for €400-450 recently, and 3rd gen i5/i7 and GTX960 (ish) class machines going for as little as €250-300.

cherryghost

So my Maplin PC is up and running after a nightmare month of RMA'ing. The GPU failed and Maplin refuse to take in to repair/refund/exchange. After back and forth with Asus they agreed to replace it so I have it up and running since last week!

i5 6400
8gb DDR4
GTX 1060 3GB
120GB SATA, 3TB + 1TB HDD
Corsair VS 450W

All in, about 150 euro total (the PSU, Case, SATA were purchased from Amazon, I had 3TB drive spare). Running Plex, Deluge, Apache, and Steam Big Picture now. I used Steam ROM manager via mostly Retroarch to add about 200/300 ROMs off NES/SNES/Genesis/PSX/N64/GC/PS2/Wii/Wii U/PS3 games to BP, all with their own customized steam tiles. Looks and plays great! Been playing Witcher 3, Forza Horizon 3, FIFA 18, BF1 on my TV downstairs while the wife streams via plex without any issues. I have a 1gbps LAN plug running to the router in the other room to keep up with bandwidth demand.

Nibs05

Having a bit of frustration with a second hand GTX1070

TerrorFirmer

A bit? That's like saying you're having a bit of trouble with a new car because it's pulled over on the hard shoulder....in flames.

Nibs05

TerrorFirmer wrote: »

A bit? That's like saying you're having a bit of trouble with a new car because it's pulled over on the hard shoulder....in flames.

Lol, lesson learned, don’t buy from CEX, returning tomorrow. Unless it’s my PC giving up the ghost.

Cuddlesworth

Nibs05 wrote: »

Lol, lesson learned, don’t buy from CEX, returning tomorrow. Unless it’s my PC giving up the ghost.

That's artifacting, its dead.

MiskyBoyy

Nibs05 wrote:

Lol, lesson learned, don’t buy from CEX, returning tomorrow. Unless it’s my PC giving up the ghost.

CeX are normally grand tho. Whenever I've sold anything to them, they test it extensively.

Weird in this case.

TerrorFirmer

MiskyBoyy wrote: »

CeX are normally grand tho. Whenever I've sold anything to them, they test it extensively.

Weird in this case.

They don't though.

Graphics card aren't too bad, they do stress test those in fairness, but very randomly. I had a guy tell me before my card failed. Surprising, considering I'd been using it daily with no issues.

"Why'd it fail?"
"It overheated"
"Really? Oh, damn, it was always fine. What happened?"
"It went above 75 degrees"
"But...that's completely normal for any card"
"No, sorry, it overheated".
"But it worked fine"
"Except it overheated"

Other examples include a guy who I returned faulty ram to, and he - no joke - sniffed it like a piece of food.

"Strange, doesn't smell faulty".

Wish that was a joke. But apart from cards, they do not test RAM, CPUs, HDDs or SSDs, they just take them in.

I buy a fair few CPU's off them, and again they don't test those. Now, to be fair - they are good for no quibbles returns. Having said that I have received:

DDR3/DDR4 ram that was actually ECC ram.

An i7 that was actually a Pentium in an i7 box.

Several processors that are actually warped, so bent that a quick test under light shows a curve.

Processors with rust stains on them.

HDD's that are stone dead.

Don't get me wrong - they can often have decent prices, they give a 2 year warranty that's pretty no quibble.

But they test almost nothing, and it's frustrating as hell unless you have a local store that you can easily return stuff to. Thankfully, there's one 5 minutes from me.

MiskyBoyy

The Waterford & Wexford stores must overly test **** then

MiskyBoyy

TerrorFirmer wrote:

"Strange, doesn't smell faulty".

TerrorFirmer wrote:

Other examples include a guy who I returned faulty ram to, and he - no joke - sniffed it like a piece of food.

That's pretty funny in fairness lol

Nibs05

Well I traded my 1060 for the 1070 because I’m going 1440p and got a deal on a new Gsync Dell monitor, hopefully they will refund me and I can move on and get something else.

TerrorFirmer

Nibs05 wrote: »

Well I traded my 1060 for the 1070 because I’m going 1440p and got a deal on a new Gsync Dell monitor, hopefully they will refund me and I can move on and get something else.

Ah they will. To be fair, I buy from them expecting the worst, and even though it's 50/50 on anything outside graphics card, they do refund without question.

So if you've a local store near you, it is a risk worth taking. At the moment their GPU prices are a bit crap because they haven't responded to the drop in GPU prices due to the mining craze.

About 18 months ago, their prices were basically 30% off market price with a 2 year warranty.

Now, they're pretty much 30% above market price.

Nibs05

TerrorFirmer wrote: »

Ah they will. To be fair, I buy from them expecting the worst, and even though it's 50/50 on anything outside graphics card, they do refund without question.

So if you've a local store near you, it is a risk worth taking. At the moment their GPU prices are a bit crap because they haven't responded to the drop in GPU prices due to the mining craze.

About 18 months ago, their prices were basically 30% off market price with a 2 year warranty.

Now, they're pretty much 30% above market price.

Great stuff, thanks !

Sonics2k

PC has been running very slowly lately, long time to boot up and games can take an age. Decided to just do a restart of the whole system, delete the lot.

It's on 9%. It's been on 9% since 9.30am

****e