Gadgetory

hey everyone i'm steve from gamers nexus dotnet we're doing another episode of ask GN where you submit the questions on the tech side of the industry or gaming and we'll try and answer them so if you have questions for next week post them below in the comments and I will address those in the next episode if we can get to them first off today we're starting with a DX 12 question which is kind of interesting and it comes from Charlie Brown's 112 who says shouldn't we be expecting higher performance gains from xbox one ports given that they are also built on a low-level API very similar to dx12 it was mind-boggling that rise of the Tomb Raider was released without the x12 support at launch and with minimal performance gains if any at all so the main thing here is that the xbox one API is not the same as DX 12 they're both low-level they both go to the metal so to speak but they're not the same and that means that it's not as simple as just sort of porting the entire language set that communicates with the API from one platform to the other so they do actually have to build these games developers from the ground up for dx12 support to work properly and you can find that in our interview with chris Roberts where we talk about Vulcan and DX 12 and how to get it all working with the best level off of optimization the developers have to sort of start from zero and work upward and that's because if you just do a wrapper which is basically sort of changing API calls doing a rapper will introduce overhead so dx12 wrapped suddenly becomes worse than the x11 just because it wasn't built from the ground up for it so that's really kind of the top level of why these things happen the way they do and dan was like total war war hammer will be pretty interesting to look at because that's another dx12 supported game but I know that they're still working on the support and is still being built in right now so it's kind of a we'll see how well it really works out at the end because we don't know if it was built ground up with it or sort of added later with some encouragement from GPU manufacturers things like that so that hopefully answer some of that question speaking specifically to rise of the Tomb Raider if you look at other benchmarks like ashes of singularity you'll see the same sort of thing where initial benchmarks show dx11 actually performed better or pretty similar to DX 12 and those benchmarks have improved steadily as the game has updated to improve its dx12 integration and that's what you'll see with rise of the Tomb Raider and other games as well until we get to a point where dx12 is the only API being used or Vulcan and not the x11 I think that's pretty much going to be the case for everything but the next question does tie into this a bit it's from Drake Owen who says or Drake Owens he says hi Steve I have two sgn questions one when will we see benchmarks of dx12 using one graphics card and the igp and two what are your thoughts on the Windows Store dx12 attempt to restrict third-party ad on such as fraps so a few things here we'll start with the second question first the restriction of these third-party tools it's not all just Microsoft trying to restrict things there is actually at an overlay level dx12 doesn't work the same with dx11 so perhaps isn't necessarily restricted as much as it is just not supported and I don't know if wraps is being actively developed anymore other overlays have the same issue cam for example and the Exies cam is being updated so that it will work with dx12 and Vulcan so it's not really restriction it's just that they have to be updated to work now there are restrictions specifically with the Windows Store titles and gears of war is one of those titles there are a couple others quantum break we've talked about previously so my thoughts are pretty clear on those if you check out that video we definitely railed against Microsoft a bit but the Windows Store I'm not a fan of right now reminds me a bit too much of games for windows live Microsoft's trying to do a bit too much of their control just using the cwp and different file extensions breaks pretty much everything including control panels from GPU manufacturers so that's a big problem what they want to do and what they're actually doing I think are two different things it sounds like they want to sort of unify the system between consoles and PC who knows what that really means but what's happening is it's creating this sort of games windows live ecosystem where stuff breaks on the Windows Store platform but works fine on steam so it just makes more sense to buy it somewhere else but the idea i guess is potentially noble if they do it right so speaking to the dx12 benchmarks using one GPU nigp that's something i want to test about it wasn't supported out the gate with those initial explicit DG you dx12 functions that were built into some of the games that we've tested previously and ashes of singularity and the the puzzle game from crow team Talos the Talos principle both of those are games that can be used DX call in Vulcan for doing explicit multi-gpu testing in the future but as far as I'm aware they don't presently fully support IGP integration so we can't really test that right now but it would be interesting to see definitely kind of like a dual graphics set up with the AMD cpu and GPU next question is from cows tube 3 who says which is the weirdest issue you've had with your PC so far weirdest issue probably was a demon monitor that happened after a lightning strike there's a lightning strike power surges always do lots of damage to equipment i would not recommend them and one of these CRT monitors i had back in the day actually became so possessed and demonic that it would kill systems so i don't know how it happened this is kind of before i was more on the technical side but somehow just connecting the display to the pc would actually destroy the video card and that was results of the lightning strike so that was very hard to troubleshoot and figure out because why would you suspect a CRT monitor to be frying your GPUs that's probably the weirdest one I've had next question here this is kind of a pretty real question it looks like perfect circle 10,000 to asks I have a question for the next episode is star citizen going to benefit from more than four cores and also asks is the sweet spot for gaming going to be six to eight cores it does hyper-threading matter basically asking all about star citizen and threading star citizens on crayons and that means it's threading is basically spa it spawns one thread for each aspect of the game so if you play star citizen now you'll see that thread three is very heavily saturated I'm not sure what's on thread three but it's definitely being abused and they're probably gonna optimize that going forward but generally you see things like game logic being on one thread AI on one thread game rendering on one thread maybe audio if it's complex enough is on one thread so that's how CryEngine spawns these threads and CryEngine was one of the first engines to really properly support eight total threads so hyper threading is actually in fact something that can be utilized by CryEngine and star citizen as an extension right now there's it's not really good time to test because the game is not fully built and optimized core 3 is being abused but in our previous discussions with chris Roberts it was made very clear by him and his team that star citizen wants to utilize as many threads as it's given so 8 threads is probably where I would be looking just based on those discussions but I don't have a lot of test data right now that would suggest really where star citizen lies in the future so we'll still have to wait for squadron 42 to ship and see what that looks like as the first final product of the game before really knowing how the threading works but that's the top level I know that Chris does want to actually use as many threads as present he wants to use eight and use hyper threading and all that stuff so it's a good sort of bet to look into that direction with CPUs last question from almond Roseman 3 who says are you ever going to change your attire black shirt and blue jeans no so thanks for watching ask GN I will see you all next week be sure to post questions in the comments below if you have any questions about tech or games that we can address and of course hit the patreon link the post roll video if you wanna help us out directly I'll see you all next time