Gadgetory

hey everyone i'm steve from gamers nexus donna and we are back for another episode of ask GN it's been a while probably a month or two because we have been slammed with one content piece after another as you've all seen but i want to come back and visit ask GN and the new questions that have been posed on all of the direct extrav in bulk and content especially so starting us off we have a question from store-brand great name by the way who says if nvidia cards that need an sli bridge to connect in i guess normal sli how does the 970 connect to the 390 x without the bridge so this was specifically on the sli fire video we did where we talk about running multiple cards from different brands under something called explicit multi-gpu in directx 12 so this test in particular was run with the ashes of singularity the 390 x and the 970 that we ran were not connected by a bridge of any kind they were just in the PCIe slots and that is done there is something called MDA or multi display adapter the normal setup for sli is LD a link display adapter and the test we did for DirectX 12 does not require a bridge they communicate strictly through the PCIe interface they talk through the PCIe bus instead of that one gigabyte per second bridge that always sits on the top of the card so Direct X 12 is able to use MDA so that multi-brand cards can be configured in the same system and talk to one another without a proprietary bridge and it also does mean that you would be able to ditch bridges in the future for sli potentially depending on how Nvidia and the game developers work with this technology now for direct six eleven you're still using bridges for sli and for md the crossfire bridge is actually not required anymore for most modern setups so next question then is from a non Amos so anonymous says so when are we going to see actual gains in games with regard to Vulcan and DirectX 12 and then he says again when so anonymous the answer that question from the Vulcan versus directx11 video is pretty simple really it just depends on when game developers start integrating this technology into their games properly and I keep mentioning this in these videos but we talk about this with chris Roberts in a Vulcan and Direct X 12 interview a while ago and it's actually got some really good content about this exact point and the answer is that developers need to actually build their games from the ground up to see real games for these ap is as opposed to just sort of changing the calls to the API the API calls and the code because you can definitely call Direct X 12 or Vulcan and just sort of plant the API in there pull it up as necessary on devices that are compatible with it but it doesn't mean that the advantages will be scenes the end user so to see those advantages the developers need to build ground up they have to do special things for optimization for even things like the explicit multi-gpu that needs to be handled explicitly through the developer they need to sit there and make sure it's functional not just sort of included as a package the same goes for any other optimizations or feature sets within these various ap is so the short answer is it depends I would probably say at least a year before we start seeing real serious gains from dx12 and Vulcan and serious implementation attempts but right now so many people are still on Windows 7 and Windows 8 that it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to go exclusive to DX 12 and those who have gone or claim to have gone exclusive the DX 12-4 generally exclusivity with the Windows Store I would probably argue that it's actually not as optimized as it could be because most of these games you have to remember they're in development for years at a time often and the x12 hasn't really been ready for quite that long so they may just be more of the the changing calls types of game support for the new api's so definitely a year probably more than that for actual serious gains and at that point the fidelity will be amped up enough that we start forgetting about the gains that were given because the game graphics will improve hopefully in step with the amount of overhead that the APS removed from the cpu and so forth next question is from guglielmo Miguel ax who said I'm wondering maybe I lost it when you set it but it there any difference in the CPU usage at all between dx11 and the x12 here in ashes of singularity or AOS so that was in the SLI fire video also and the answer is yes actually one of the biggest things for these new AP is directors 12 in Vulcan explicitly is that they remove a lot of overhead from the cpu and they do that by handling draw calls differently so draw calls will get fed into the GPU instead which is a parallel processor it's got more cores available to run these geometric draw calls like draw calls basically when the cpu tells the GPU hey it's time to draw this piece of geometry on the screen and the GP does it but if we remove the cpu from that process it actually speeds things up a lot or yet at least reduce the CPUs workload in that process because the CPU is a sequential processor can only do one of these at a time even though it can do many many transactions per second could be billions of cycles per second depend on what you're working with so directx 11 and 12 yes there's a big difference between the CPU performance in DX 11 and 12 under ideal situations going back to the previous question I just answered if the game is not really fully built ground up for dx12 the know you might actually see some performance loss depending on the level of driver support the video card using as asynchronous sort of tuned and the game's optimization with that particular API so that's the that's the story right now for dx11 vers 12 with cpu support and then we've also got one a sort of off question here that's not related to the new AP is and that was from a masseuse said what a cheap psu tester do the same job as the multi multi meter that we used in the motherboard on fire video so when we let our motherboard on fire accidentally and use the multimeter to check the power supply voltage on each of the rails and each of the pens that was to show that yes 12 volts it's coming through 5 volts coming through 3.3 volts coming through whatever yes if you get a psu tester even it's a twenty-dollar one it will basically do the same job most of them the good ones have lcds on them they have display is to show you what the voltages are in the very least they just light up and say good or bad and that would make your life a bit easier if you're doing this regularly if you already own a multimeter is cheaper to use the multimeter and test it but if you don't then it's probably cheaper to buy just a cheapo $20 psu tester and test the voltage that way multimeters of course are a lot more versatile there so I would recommend getting one if you're doing this type of stuff regularly the last question here is from loquera who says what should I get GTX 970 or r9 390 or r9 390 excuse me not to X and that's from the previous ask GN video this depends so the GTX 970 we've seen outperform the 390 x and a lot of games lately and that just sort of depends on which games they are and who the developers are and that's because of the game works optimizations and all these other things that are in there where Nvidia maybe more optimized on either their drivers or on the game software side to better support the NVIDIA GPUs and that benefits the GTX 970 in the matchup between 972 390 or 3 90 x that said they trade blows a lot especially as you increase the resolution and we see AMD generally does start to swing favourably against nvidia when the resolution is pushed to 1440p or similarly high resolutions so that is one instance where Andy does have a bit of an advantage depends on what kind of monitor and resolution setup you're planning to go with but the thing with the resolution increase is if you're working with an ultra-wide or something like that you basically just take the the width times the height that gives you your total pixel count so once you expand past 1920 x 1080 whatever that is a couple million the actually more than that I've once you expand past that point and he does start getting a bit of an advantage with their game processing and that's because the way the pixel pipeworks Andy does better raw throughput of pixel processing for high resolutions whereas Nvidia will often handle things like filtration tasks and all these post FX and things like that a bit better than AMD so just the sort of truncated answer is it depends both are good GPUs both are affordable right now but I would say look at what you're playing does the game you you want to play maybe invest hundreds or thousands of hours into does it tend to favor the 970 with the 390 you can find that in a lot of our benchmarks or other people's benchmarks and then look at things like extras so with that video card you get shadowplay and things like that and the has its own video capture software I personally will say that we do use shadow play for our game capture because a bit easier to work with and it's pretty reliable and these GV are basically DVR but gbr for games was good I am not sure how it works these days because it's been sort of metamorphism to play as TB and all this other stuff with Raptor but that is one thing to look at power consumption while draw of course is an argument as well and then if you really care about overclocking maybe you're an enthusiast you would want whatever card high-end card in either the 970 or 390 class or 3 90 x class that will give you the most overhead for play with overclocking if that's important to you but otherwise look at the price and then look at the benchmarks for the particular games that you want to play that should basically answer it there's no real wrong choice here for the most part so that is all for this video other than one last throw in question here that we had posted just before filming this and is from the high/low 623 who says quote are you ever going to cut your hair no so thank you for watching ask DN check the link in the description below to hit the website up if you want to read all of our in-depth coverage as always patreon link the postural video to help us out directly I'll see you all next time