Gadgetory

hey everyone welcome back to another episode of ask gee Enron 31 now so as always if you have questions post them in the comment section below we'll try and address them I've got a couple good ones here this time testing methodology and otherwise before getting to the SPN questions this content is brought to you by Andy freesync products including this algae monitor I've got next to me this is a 34 inch monitor 34 40 by 1440 and it is a an affordable one at eight hundred twenty seven dollars so we've talked about these before the Acer predator the g-sync monitor I have that we've tested with for 30 for 40 by 1440 that one we've talked about before it's the most expensive one I've worked with it's north of a thousand dollars so that monitor is the one that we basically published some data on said hey 34 40 by 1440 is really not that hard of a resolution to sustain if you've got these newer video cards the $300 plus cards especially even though our X 480 does okay with them gtx 1060 does okay with them just depends on how much you're willing to sacrifice for your settings to play on an ultra wide resolution but we've got some content on that and I really do think if you've got an issue where like in some of our use cases where you're out of physical real estate on the desk it's sometimes easier to fit in ultra wide whether it's this one or the predator it doesn't matter if it's a sponsor or not it is just easier to fit an ultra wide in some spaces and from production standpoint I do prefer working with them so that is the the plug I guess we extended a bit there and talked about a stirs product as well but that's kind of what we do edge yeah so first question this week is from dr. noob arias who says why is it that one using a frame rate higher than the refresh rate the game's a look and feel smoother this is a really good question I've talked about this in the past and a couple different content pieces I'll do a flyby here for more depth we have a convey do from probably CES 2014 or something where I spoke with Nvidia on camera about g-sync in that video we explained how how missing or hitting refresh cycles on a display can impact your fluidity of framerate and same thing we talked with AMD at CES I think last year about free sync or maybe I just talked so low on that one but same idea so to recap it quickly there are a few variables here one of them the question for those who maybe don't follow it's as simple as if I've got say 130 fps pushing out of my video card but my monitors 60 Hertz why does it feel smoother the answer the main part of the answer I think anyway is because of the latency between the frames so when we talk about the 1% and point 1% lows that many of you are familiar with in the in the review content those numbers are extrapolated by or extracted I should say by taking a variable called on present so there's a couple different variables when you measure a framerate it's not just you measure the framerate of a game and its output strictly as FPS depending on your tool our tools including presentment and I guess for apps to some degree will output rather the frame number so say we record 3000 frames in a 30-second sequence or something like that then it would be from one frame to frame 354 and then the other number that's plotted against that is the frame time the milliseconds so milliseconds between frames some do a delta and some do cumulative so depending on that you may have frame 1 happened at 0 milliseconds frame to having at 13 milliseconds 3 happened at 26 milliseconds so that's how the the date is recorded then from there you can pull the FPS number by just doing some calculations pretty simple stuff can be done on a spreadsheet you just need a formula to do it and determine how many frames per second you're getting so that's how the data is created in the charts that we use where you get an average of 1% of point understand as for how it impacts the fluidity the reason we use these numbers is because when you're testing frame times the important thing is not just how quickly the frames come out with the FPS number but also how consistent the frames are from one to the next so if you've got a hundred plus frames coming out of your video card through on present which more of an engine level measurement and you're measuring say a frame time consists of a consistent frame time output one frames the next of a couple milliseconds five eight milliseconds something like that that basically guarantees you're never gonna miss a refresh on the monitor depending on your vsync or adaptive sync settings I'm not going to go into every single of the combinations permutations here but depending on your settings there it means you'll never miss a sync on the monitor so that happens at if you've got a 60 Hertz monitor it would be I think 16 milliseconds every 16 milliseconds it should refresh 60 Hertz so that's that seems about right it's eight milliseconds I believe for a 120 Hertz so you never miss one of those that's one thing the next thing regardless of sync settings even if you've got vsync disabled and you have no adaptive sync like free sync this thing would have orgy sync the competition to this thing if you've got no adaptive sync no vsync the next thing to look at are going to be dips so the dips in frame rate throughput are probably going to be less and bad you're less likely to fall below the refresh on the display if let's I don't know what this refresh is off the top of my head but let's just pretend this monitors a 60 Hertz refresh and we have no free sink enabled so if it's 60 Hertz refresh and we start dipping to 20 30 FPS and our low values not only is that visible anyway because the it'll just look like a stutter in gameplay you start entering into territory of either tearing or stuttering depending on again you're seeing setting the vsync will eliminate tearing but can introduce stuttering if you fall below the refresh rate of the display and no vsync means that you get a lot of tearing but depending on if your what your frame rate is but you eliminate stuttering so normally when you talked something like an eSports player they will almost always favor tearing to stuttering because in one event with a tear it's basically you imagine a frame being drawn and then a new frame starts getting drawn on top of it when a monitor paints a frame it does it from the top left to the bottom right so actually if you if you took a super high-speed camera or just even a screen capture solution and he measured as it drew frames you would see it painting pixels from the top left to the top right and all the way down till you got to the bottom right that obviously happens exceptionally fast but that is part of the sort of what you're looking at when when there's a tear so if there's a tear it'll be an instance where you might have a tree vertical object that you can see is no longer aligned because one frame has drawn on top of another and there's a runt frame there we call it or if there's stuttering it's the opposite issue where the frames come out just fine and they're complete frames no real tearing in your graphics and your textures but instead it'll kind of feel like there's a repeat so it'll take the previous frame and effectively reproject it that's more of a VR term but you get the idea we protect the previous frame and then you have sort of missing data for the the one frame you're on currently until the next one draws that happens when you've missed a refresh like on the monitor so if your monitor is expecting a frame every eight or 16 milliseconds it doesn't draw on time it misses that refresh and then reproject the previous frame then the next eight or 16 milliseconds cycle you'll get a new frame so that's 8 to 16 milliseconds in there where you have no frame that's perceived to the user as a stutter so I think that starts to answer the question that's if you have a higher frame rate these things are less of a concern you're gonna be above thresholds where it's more visible to the user higher frame rate generally not always if you look at our battlefield 1 results generally a higher frame rate does coincide with better frame times not always the case again but if you have better frame times you're less likely to have those noticeable dips and the inconsistency is what kills it so you could have a 100 FPS output but if you have frame times that are 10 10 10 milliseconds 10 milliseconds 10 milliseconds then you have one that's 18 or for doesn't have to be multiple that something like that then you'll notice it that does tend to happen more often with a lower end device or with lower frame rate than not so I said I wasn't gonna explain the whole thing but I think that basically explains the whole thing that was in the previous content you can still find more if you're curious about it we've written about it before on the website click on specs dictionary and click on you can read about screen tearing screens hurry and I've got information there next question is Adrian cavity who says why are games most Triple A games don't utilize the extra power of hyper-threading doesn't make any sense that most modern games require four cores and not utilizing CPUs with more than four cores or with hyper-threading thanks for answering this is a good place to go and look at our interview with Sean Tracy from the star citizen team specifically the interview where we talk about CPU thread management and if someone wants to dig that up and post it in the comments below that'd be great cuz I'm gonna keep listing things to go to and forget to link them in the description but we talked about job management there that's part of it basically this is on a development side engine side more than anything the engines need to be all modernized to support more threads CryEngine they made a big deal out of this maybe two and a half years ago when CryEngine started supporting eight threads that was a big deal and the way they did it then is different from now back then an engine would basically say we have a game render thread that's generally core 1 or thread one that starts really get abused and we have a an audio thread of physics thread and AI thread and so on I don't have all of them I've thought my head but that's that's there's the core ones so generally with engines you will see most the abuse on the first court regardless of whether you have hyper threading and a lot of these engines really only efficiently utilize two cores even though they might ask for four as a requirement the other two might just be juggling AI which sometimes is non-existent or very low load Japan what you're playing and then of course audio is generally the other one so that is that is largely an engine factor now as for hyper-threading specifically there are a few games where you can see a hyper-threading benefit one of them as I've mentioned before is Metro last light it's more of a benchmark than a game at this point but it proves the concept that in the averages with Metro last light with hyper-threading without hyper-threading you'll see that they look pretty much the same but when looking at the low performance mister apparently a 1% lower values that we test those can be gapped as much as 2x depending on what video card is being tested and that's because of hyper threading being disabled you get a big reduction point 1% in that game so that's potentially more stutters visible sometimes we would see I don't know the specific card but this was during the 900 series where I was very confused for about a week because my results were testing the same way as previously but they looked different in the low numbers and that was because hyper threading was disabled so it is largely game sight issue though and an engine side issue I will probably see more SMT which is the sort of base technology that hyper threading is Intel's version we'll see more SMT support I think going forward because then we'll also be using SMT now so maybe developers will have more reason to actually explicitly support a lot of threads but still end of the day it's still a lot of thread 1 and thread 2 occupation lower-level api's made it assist with that in the future because rendered tasks are getting moved off of thread 1 which is bottleneck and everything in the in the sequence because the sequential processor next question is Teemo for life he's definitely posted before says overclocking my monitor safe will it reduce the lifespan I clocked - 66 Hertz is it worth it 66 Hertz I don't know if that's worth it it's a you got a 10% overclock it's not really a big deal can you really perceive an extra 6 FPS basically is the question maybe you can but we've done articles on this Michael Kern's one of our writers is more of an expert on this than I am he's done a lot of monitor overclocking the the quick answer is that we're talking safe know it is never say if it's it's sort of safe with GPUs these days they do have things to stop you from really damaging something but if you really start playing around with things following guides that are more advanced and using tools that maybe you shouldn't then know it's it's not safe you can always damage something like unlocking voltage or whatever flashing bios in the case of video cards as four monitors specifically you can pretty safely adjust within a reasonable range 10 percent is normally fine we've gotten up to 80 Hertz I think on 60 Hertz displays and normally the Korean displays will support this better the ones without scalars but those tend to be the ones to play around with because you get them cheap you can overclock them I've read stories about people heading 100 Hertz or hundred twenty Hertz I've never done that myself or seen it in person so that would certainly be worth it if you could hit that but you are going to burn out the display faster potentially as for a few reasons one that wasn't built to handle that and to these things especially like the predator that I'm dealing with do generate a good amount of heat it's a lot of power to drive a display and you got to think about it like there's I'm looking at the back of this one there's really no ventilation there's a little bit of ventilation in the bottom it feels like but that's really all you get for displays a lot of heat radiates out of the front but there is he inside where all of the logic and the PCB any power components would be and when you're overclocking anything you're generally increasing the power to the device the whatever's doing the oscillating cycle it's an overclock it and increasing the power increases the temperature there's no active cooling in there generally not in any of the monitors I use anyway so that yeah you could probably shorten the lifespan if you're not too careful but read our overclocking guide though for monitors specifically that will address the question very directly for for anyone who's interested in doing it we have a how-to as well in there one of the next questions is foreign gaming text says damn Steve you always look so tired yes my question would be as far as I've heard most of the monitoring applications show requested via Ram not actually used VRAM so it shows how much the game wants not how much it uses how true is that are there ways to measure occupied V RAM instead of requested that is true and that is accurate if you're using GPUs II and it says this game is using four gigabytes of video memory and you have a four gigabyte card it doesn't mean that you're cashing out of your memory are you exceeding your memory limitation what it probably means is that the game said I want four gigabytes of video RAM available and so that's it allocated it doesn't mean it's getting used now you can test this theory if you plug in something like a twelve gigabyte Titan X and it starts black ops starts requesting twelve gigabytes of memory then we know there's really no way this game is using twelve gigabytes of video memory actually you could put an eight gigabyte card or six gigabyte card and it probably it performs the same clock for clock spectra spec but it's requesting all of us yes that is true measuring accurately can be done with low-level api's the ISPs are generally doing it I think years of war actually taps into its real vram consumption but I'm not positive on that so that's that's maybe the feature but no software exists that I am aware of that would accurately tell you how much video RAM is actually used I'm sure someone like coarser would be able to build something like that because they work with memory as a business but we don't have anything and as far as I'm aware there's no good public tool that is accurate for that next question fd1 you mentioned in the previous video that Intel's PR has changed the point where you would rather buy it that would be the CPU than request one for review could you elaborate on that what has changed specifically if he could walk us through the process of acquiring tech review I'll keep this short elaborate on Intel's PR changing I mean just this happens all the time in history PR people move around a lot everyone in the distri moves all around pyaare especially though on one end it can be good if they move to another company we can get connection with the company we may not have talked to before because there's PR there that we're familiar with the other had it could be bad because you might not have a way to get back in touch with the company that they left in Intel's case it was an internal shuffling and I just I've probably been put in contact with four or five people in the last two years I can't keep track of them have them don't reply because their job titles change without me knowing of course why would me if they don't make a public announcement about it so it's too much work to try and keep in touch with people at Intel they're a large company it's easier to buy the product or get it through an SI and use it as a loner and then send it back later so that's the the short of that and then as for what's the process of getting a product to review its is basically eight years of establishing a brand and demanding respect for in-depth work which there's not a whole lot of these days a non tech tech report P Z perspective legit reviews certainly but not a whole lot of it now and I think that kind of generally does actually get respect so it's basically just email and ask for it we have to turn away a lot of products there's plenty more that are not finished being tested yet because it's too much comes in so we actually a lot of the time these days they reach out to us ask if we want it and I have to turn away a lot of stuff because I don't want to accept it if we can't actually review it so that's kind of process pretty simple last question Curie Gio Taku has gonna be good I'm sure dear Steve can we get a sexy hair flip at the end of the video No thank you for watching as always patreon like a push show video comments list in the comments below questions for next time subscribe for more I will see you all next time you