Gadgetory

hey everyone welcome back to another episode of ask Gianna's always leave your questions in the comments below but quick note here there's a new rule I guess we'll call it because there are so many questions on these videos now I'm still reading every single comment for asked G on videos but it would help me tremendously if you could upvote and downvote the comments with questions that you think deserve most to be answered I'm still going to go through all of them so it'll be as democratic as possible but it just will make my job a lot easier because then I'll immediately know okay this is what people are interested in this week so please do that I got to get the cat hair off the table we've got a video on o cat that just went up working on more of it so that's still in flux but let's start off with the sgn content so for the first question we've got one from covenant 11 who says dear GN what is it about Crysis 3 that keeps benchmark junkies using it as a benchmark even though even as we approach the four year anniversary of its release what features and options is it about the engine that keeps this game by pushing the hardware Crysis is definitely abusive in a lot of ways in terms of visual effects and the geometry all kinds of stuff in there tessellation so that's one reason we don't really use it I know that at least a couple outlets use it for maximum power load testing staring out of skybox is power draw a different way but it does put a lot of strain on the GPU on the system and in total so for a couple of reasons it's good to keep around to old games if you worked on Crysis years ago when it came out and you've worked on it since then it's not a bad thing to keep around and the same is true for us with Metro last light within the past grid Autosport that lived on our benchmarks for years and a couple of other games as well shadow of Mordor some people sometimes will ask why did you guys waste waste your time benchmarking shadow of Mordor and Metro last light no one plays them that's not really the point we benchmark games like GTA Battlefield Gears of War or whatever happens to be new so that you can see what the performance is on a game that you play but games like Metro and shadow of mordor we keep around so we have a look backwards in time and that can be used later for really important things for example let's say we wanted to do a driver benchmark where we're looking at how do the drivers impact performance of these cards maybe the 700 and the 200 series cards over the period of three years or whatever it may be we can do that with Metro last light in shadow board or because I've already got all that data I don't have to sit there and pull drivers from three years ago and rerun it all we have all the data on the same platforms even so that's pretty useful now it's also useful because with these games two more reasons one they're never updated so you don't have to worry about a sudden game patch like with doom just requiring that you rerun all tests which really really sucks but it's important to do because when a patch comes out and it increases and changes performance obviously you can't recycle your old data we talked about this in a previous video but or you could but you shouldn't if you're comparing new data with it so we try to keep the data the same age as much as possible and using older games helps with that and mix in a few newer games that are popular at the time another reason you would use Crysis 3 as a benchmark is because Crysis 3 or for us Metro last like both games we know very well where a particular card should fall on the chart based on just sort of intuition with benchmark you know all the other cards so if I know this card has X shaders xq2 cores or stream processors whatever has X shaders and it has Y memory it has the whatever else clock rate I know it should fall between these three cards so that's a really powerful tool for benchmarking and for figuring out rapidly if your numbers look good because more cat hair if the numbers don't like it we just shot a video a snowflake on a table because if the numbers don't look good you want to find out immediately that way you're not wasting your time running through all the other benchmarks so that's probably why some I would still use Crysis 3 I never jumped on it when it was because we weren't really doing that yet but Metro is kind of my equivalent of shadow of a crisis 3 and in shadow of mordor is in there as well though we've kind of moved away from that recently next question is absent who says do you think the price of mlc and TLC nand will continue to rise into 2017 and beyond prices keep climbing with no end in sight it seems so this is a topic that comes up pretty much every two years and it's normally with Ram but kind of the same boat with SSDs it's just as if these are more visible now than they used to be this is not something I have studied as closely as other outlets and I'll give a shout out here at Toms Hardware has probably the best article on these SSD NAND prices I'm not going to go ahead and try and compete with them you can just check their article on that for information if you search Tom's hardware that says demand prices I'm sure it'll be top result so what they were saying and all of this I agree with is that adoption and mobile and notebook and in desktop is at an all-time high for NAT and if you don't know what Nanda is we have a video on it that explains what it is as animations and everything but basically because one prices are lower than were prices were lower than ever for SSDs and two in notebooks and laptops you can decrease the size you get a smaller form factor you decrease the power consumption pretty considerably considering what's actually in there and how it's already low power consumption our hard drive 2.5 inch drive even at five volts is still drawing a decent amount of power compared to the rest of the components when the when an SSD might be a watt or less if it's idle so that's a big reason and I guess well speed of course so because of these things and because SSDs have kind of proven themselves in the market now there's a lot more people buying them for desktop but there's a tremendous amount of NAND being Huston phones right now and NAND being used in just flash memory being used in notebooks basically every Mac notebook and a good deal of Windows or learning or whatever any other notebook out there but especially Apple right now so with that your prices are gonna go up and it doesn't it's I don't have an end in sight I'm sorry so Tom's talks about it a bit more you can read more there for information next question is Chris Arellano Arellano aka hell guide and I suppose who says what's the oldest processor you have lying around and what did it come out of where did it come from I still have one from my first PC a Pentium MMX 233 and it's funny to look at now compared to current stuff first first to note we did a tour of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View California you should definitely search for a computer history museum on our channel because I was joined by Jim Vincent who is for all intents and purposes a computer historian he's been in this industry for eons and he's been programming since the start so he talks in that video about some really old processors and that's kind of fun we go through like the Cray supercomputer era and before it even the one the oldest stuff I have I have an X 386 system somewhere in an attic but the oldest one that's actually accessible and ready to use it would probably be a Pentium 4 from around I want to say 2004 maybe 2 that somewhere in 2003 to 2005 area and that processor I keep around because it was the to my knowledge the first consumer available hyper threaded CPU there might have been one other one but I think that was the first one at least that was in my price range at the time so that is a Pentium 4 or something I don't have the Mach number hyper threaded so it was the first poor-man's dual-core basically that was really available and I think from memory it had quite a few issues at launch but I think they kind of smooth that smoothed it over it was an interesting time that was not far off from when Andy put out their Athlon 64 which just recently I reread the review on an attack or a non tech about the 64-bit Athlon see you the Athlon 64 because it's actually a really critical point in history I didn't know a lot about it cuz I was really in into the detailed part of computers at that point so I want to reread it and learn from a historical perspective what it did it's a good article you should read it if you haven't but yeah my old stone probably Pentium 4 with hyper-threading and I don't know it's a p-series chipset I think I still got the system too it was in an antic land boy maybe not the land boy air that came out in the last few years but a land boy the silver one with the blue plastic grille thing on the front and the tray and it that held screws so if you ever tipped it upside down it would dump all the screws into your case and short something that was the case it was in next question Tek Pascal he says thanks again for answering my previous question my new question is how our games optimized and what determines if a game is poorly optimized for example Ark survival barely runs at 60 frames per second on my Titan XP at 1080 P max settings that's really I didn't have not tested that game that's impressive in some ways I guess is this due to poorly Optimus for optimization of the game or is the game that graphically demanding how can you tell a few things so on the graphics side a lot of optimization all the most optimization HAP's that happens at the developer house and some of it happens in the drivers especially for older older API is like the x11 where there's more driver side optimization how can you tell well if you look at things like geometry how smooth are the objects in the game the models how detailed are they you can look at meshes so in GTA 5 if you scale the mesh quality you'll see on top of some cars like jeeps we just note Andrew the camera guy just noticed this yesterday in our Reliv versus shadow play video you should go watch that and you'll see on top of the Jeep there's some headlights and they're not there on the AMD device and that's not because we change the settings but it's because of a mesh quality tuning feature that Andy has and the drivers we'll talk about later but the point is that's part of the mesh quality so if you were to scale settings back those types of things would disappear so in your games you can look up these really objects like that like headlights or in black ops 3 from memory I remember there was a tank and you lost some of the roundness of the turret on the tank because it's not like an actual thing that's used in the game so you're really not supposed to pay attention to it but if you stare at it and you change the mesh quality it'll turn more square as you go those types of thins impact the performance because the more primitives you have the more Poly's you have the more tessellation there is the heavier it's gonna hit your GPU and that's pretty easy to look at and tell a lot of the other things you could look at like how smooth are the shadows if it's for scene anti-aliasing and stuff like that some games for say a texture resolution some games will go crazy with texture resolutions and do like 4k textures when it's totally unnecessary for something like a chair so it looks freakin great if you go like prone and stare at the chair leg but totally unnecessary so that kind of stuff does eat into vram specifically with texture resolution and then the rest of it like geometry that's really heavy on the shaders post-processing stuff kind of happens at the end of the pipeline as the name would suggest the rasterization is is in there as well we have video and already calling that now as far as the optimization side of things it is largely the game developers job to figure out how do I make this look good and keep this quality but not make it kill my computer or my client or my customers computer whatever maybe so what they can do there's software like a logarithmic which works they actually I think they're represented by the same firm that represents F mod if you've seen that logo it's for audio but software like that will help developers to do things like build textures that have multiple basically sample sizes multiple resolutions that can easily be deployed so you have really good LOD scaling level of detail scaling so what happens is as they build one texture and effectively an infinite resolution almost a vector like box they can save it out and it can be saved at a 16 K 4 K 2 K 256 and all the way down the chart so that lower end hardware is better supported so that's optimization on the game side you can also do things like call useless triangles called primitives call the really anything that's either not going to be seen or appreciated by the player get rid of it and that's again on the developers side so that's where optimization was in driver's side the driver developers which would be the IH visa or Nvidia AMD they go through and they say the way that this developer is executing this particular effect doesn't work well with our shaders in the way that the architecture is structured around them and so we are going to change it so that it executes this way that's how it happens on the driver side next question is from stealth v to ths stealth one says question what kind of lifespan should people expect to closed-loop liquid coolers I've had a coarser h100 since 2013 s been running great when should I consider replacement are there any signs to be on the lookout for such as pump failure originally had this on the 3770k and now in the 6700 K yeah so we talked about this briefly in the past as well but just refresh everyone a lot of the ASA tech coolers have a bit of a lifespan of about five years that's pretty much the industry standard the new ng oxy cracking coolers have a warranty of six years you can actually expect them to last that long and basically though it sits around five years plus or minus 1 depending on which supplier and which generation of pump you go with for science to look out for that's the important part you should probably if you have this is what I do because I'm a little paranoid about liquid coolers because we've worked with so many I've seen probably three or four fail at this point and it does they work great nothing works better than an AI oh if you want something fast cheap to deploy and way better than air for the most part there's some exceptions but good AIO will be better than decent air good air even so when I deploy them I set up at least something like speed fan but ideally use a bit more advanced software but speed fan of the least is free and it does check the core temperature a little inaccurate with AMD that's that's just also at this point it doesn't necessarily read the and the temperatures perfectly Intel works fine AMD I need to research still but generally you'll at least at the very least even with AMD it is inaccurate in a consistent way I don't know how much that assault rivers is AMD and what they have on their chip for diodes but the point is it's inaccurate in the same way and so if you're seeing a temperature even on AMD Hardware that's like let's it often reports below ambient for me so let's say it says the temperature is 20 C probably not real but whatever let's say it is and that's what it says for the entire three years use the cooler one day it says 40 C well you know there's a problem and the thing you can do with a cooler best thing you do monitor temperatures occasionally and listen for noise when it starts making a lot of pump noise there could be a few things one you might have a tubes oriented incorrectly and check the manual for that or two it could be that the liquid has begun permeating the tubes and that's just what happens with these the liquid it it doesn't necessarily evaporate but it permeates into the rubber and so the the plastic or the rubber tubing over time will pull enough of that liquid out of the actual loop that it starts to lose its performance the pump has to work in ways that it wasn't designed to work and you get pump noise normally Gergely and things like that and that will happen with some of the like the kraken x41 series a so tech coolers made some of that gurgling and on and off throughout life no matter what even if they're fine so don't be too alarmed but if you hear it a lot then maybe look into a replacement you can also touch the tubes near where they connect to the pump and if they feel hot it really should not feel hot if it feels like it's about the same temperature as the backplate of your video card then it's time for replacement because that means either one its operating way out of spec you need a better cooler anyway or to the pumps just not really working anymore and it's not pushing the liquid through fast enough to cool down on the radiator it sits there in the tubes and heats up really fast so that's what you can look out for I'm sure there's things but that's that's the short ride so as always patreon link the post will you Fiona how was that directly leave questions in the comment section below please up vote and down with them to help me find the good ones ideally we just use the up voting system and just push push all the good ones at the top and everyone's happy and everyone gets a thumbs up but I guess that's not really how YouTube works so either way help me out push the good ones up you can tweet at us too with short questions and subscribe for more I'll see you all next time