Gadgetory

everyone welcome back to another ask G episode it's been a little while last travel if you have questions for next week's episode post them in the comments below and we'll try to get them for that video some of these are from our patreon discord so if you don't see the questions from the comments from the last episode that's because they came from our patreon backers on discord because I needed some new questions because the previous video is all rise and stuff and we answered most that in the reviews before getting to this episode this coverage is brought to you by EVGA and there FTW three icx card which is a 1080 TI icx card meaning it has the NTC thermistors attached all over the board so you can get VR MVM temperature readings and additional GPU reading and stuff like that kind of cool check out the link in the description below for more information on that card so based on my vague understanding of what our upload schedule should be this week in theory we already have content up pertaining to this device here if that is the case then this first questions already answered which was does the switch still work asked by many people and the answer is yes for the most part so it works well enough to do the thermal testing we can play rather the wild on it it functions basically as expected there are a couple extra screws that that were not extra when I took it apart originally but I does it's in good shape and you don't really need those anyway apparently because it's held together just fine so yeah that's good to go first question is from walter favor who says why are modern games using more and more vram the textures don't seem to look any better and I believe added some extras I have I used to have two 772 gigabyte cards in SLI which I could play crysis 3 at 1080 ultra without getting bad framerate and running out of VRAM I currently have a 290x 4 gigabyte and I now seem to be it slowly going out of VRAM again why is that our game that I came dev is just becoming more awful at efficiently using vram that's always a possibility but not not to slight devs just because the development environment is so insanely fast-paced this is why directx12 and vulcan is taking so long to get rolling because those low-level api s are really not trivial to program for which is a different question really but but same idea where optimization is not huh not an easy thing when you're also trying to just make the game and get it out the door but as for the the kind of you ran requirement there's a few things here the first thing to kind of mention which i've done in the past in previous episodes is a depending on how you're measuring vram that number you're seeing might be misleading so there are a few ways to do this a couple of games like GTA 5 was one of the first we really praised for adding a VRAM bar and their options many that was pretty cool couple companies are doing that now I think Ghost Recon wildlands included and the division maybe that's that's one way to look at V RAM consumption that is going to be an estimate based on whatever the developers have put in there to ask to make consumption and theory that should be pretty accurate that's generally the maximum amount that would be consumed now the other way the more common way would be to take a tool like gpu-z and just look at what it says is being consumed for vram now the misleading thing here is that all gpu-z knows is how much vrm is more or less being engaged not necessarily used just requested access to by the applications so an example would be I think call of duty black ops 3 is the game that we've tested a lot in the past that one will look like it can consume 10 to 12 Giga bytes of VRAM with the Titan X or something in reality you'll be just fine without that but that's just because it's sitting there requesting all of it it doesn't know if it's gonna use it or not it's just saying hey give me all that memory you have not necessarily actually using the memory so depending on the tools you're using the first part of this question why are games using more v-ray I might just be that they're your cards have more vram and the tools you're using to look at consumption are saying that all of it's being used because the games are just requesting all of it not necessarily using it so that's part one as far as actual usage of VRAM I would say look at things like consoles now we have the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox one or whatever it is right now whatever iteration they're on 1 s I don't know but we're the consoles are upwards of 8 gigabytes of memory at this point and that means that the developers have some more freedom to actually use more memory on the consoles as they port these PC maybe they don't optimize it as well or maybe they are using more vram that doesn't answer your why don't textures seem to look better a question I think that's more of a subjective thing but I would say that consoles are one of the first places to look just because if you are building for the lowest common denominator and that is now an 8 gigabyte memory device suddenly you can use a whole lot more vram than previously seems permissible and considering your porting to maybe a PC where the RAM is pretty high and Excel vrm and memory because their system memory too we don't have the same limitation as consoles in that regard you're gonna be able to build more complex images and textures and things like that but as for textures don't seem to look any better I guess that probably just depends on the game more than anything because there are some games that look legitimately really good but yeah so they answer in short is a few parts it's one how are you measuring it if you're using tools that just say how much vram is being requested then as you upgrade video cards it will always look like more V rounds being consumed which you can test by running a game with a card that has 4 gigabytes put another one in that has 6 or 8 put another one in that has more if you have access to all those and you'll see that each time with the right games or the wrong games more and more will be requested even though the game performance in terms of memory consumption might be the same the next question is from Joe Gibbs he says hey GN a friend wants to build a new PC on Rison he wants 32 gigabytes of RAM and when asked why he says he wants it to do graphic design I think he should buy 16 and then maybe upgrade in the future if he runs out do you think 16 is still enough in 2017 and when should you go for 32 gigabytes so the the most immediate thing was the support graphic design I'm not 100% sure what that means depending on the software the first thing I would do is say take the current system and run the projects that you're like a representative size of what you'll be doing on a day to day basis for us that might be something like premier run in our case premier or Photoshop or whatever open a project file that would be representative maybe get some chrome windows or whatever in the background just to eat another thousand gigabytes of memory that's what chrome does and then look at your memory consumption and from there figure out what do I need for my tax bill that would be step one step two Rison still has some issues with supporting four sticks of memory in theory that should be kind of worked out going forward I'm not 100% sure the details on it right now there are more and more efi updates coming from all the board vendors that for the most part almost well really like 100% of them right now our addressing memory issue is memory clock or memory capacity or whatever in theory that support gets better so first first thing to do see how much memory is being used currently once you've kind of plotted that against some common use cases then look at the options for Rison if you need 32 gigabytes keep in mind that generally speaking more sticks of memory in some of the existing Rison platforms may mean that you run at a lower clock rate if that is acceptable for the most cases well I guess it depends on what you're doing but for the most case it probably is if you really just care about capacity and not speed then go for it but if not I would say just do some some research on the platforms out there the crosshair 6 has gotten better and better almost on a weekly basis they're like I mean they're pushing beta update to us every couple days for EFI or for BIOS if you prefer and that is generally improving memory support and the same is true for the gigabyte gaming 5 board but yeah some boards still have issues with 4/6 memory rising as a platform in general has some issues with memory again in general so make sure you do you research the kits you buy may not actually clock to they're advertised rate on the kit depending on again motherboard efi chip and use all kinds of stuff and you can check tries and review hours included and a couple others as well legit reviews as a good memory discussion you can check those from our information well the short answer thirty two gigabytes you can totally use in the right use cases we blow through that in some of our projects with a lot of warp stabilizes or sped up time lapse type things so it may be worthwhile the next question is from Street guru who posted this in our patreon discord again patreon.com slash K person axis if you want to get in on that Street guru asks also going to guess you'll have a rise and overclocking guide at some point perhaps bring in build to chat about it yes that is the plan I've been talking with builds worried about that he's waiting for your motherboard still Verizon and he's on another continent it's not easy for us to share parts with them it's also very expensive to get them there so he should have a board at some point it's just a matter of when they become available in that region and we're hoping to contract them to help us out with an overclocking guy that's a bit more in-depth than you might normally get so that is in the plans yes next question Steve Strazza also from discord asks why is vram a fixed component on the GPU not user replaceable in parentheses as opposed to CPU Ram which is standardized and replaceable I would say probably the most answer to that is going to be latency or size V Ram is soldered its BGA is it's got a hundred and something hundred seventy pins maybe or hundred seventy solder points so the ball grid array it allows the memory to take less of a footprint on the PCB if that's item number one that's really important so being smaller you can pack it in denser which is important for a GPU where you don't have a full motherboard size available to you also the latency is a lot better on something like gddr5 versus ddr4 three that's really important for a video card where you're really trying to avoid ever talking to system memory if possible you want to store as much game content as possible into the local memory that's because the latency is lower which is because it is that BGA gddr5 architecture has a to standard ddr4 that you put in a system their system memory in general so that's the main part the size would probably be the other one because if you can think about it putting on Ram sized slots that socket onto something like this is not very size friendly you could do it with I guess something like laptop Timms but that's that's kind of how I read into that question that's the basics of it I don't I don't know that I have a more in-depth explanation for you a next question Dana of Starfall also Dischord said question for ask GN how much of a quality difference is there in general between motherboard manufacturers and where is the difference the biggest sometimes it seems like all of the motherboards are exactly the same yeah so I I remember feeling the same way a long time ago and in some regard they are very similar this is especially true as the CPUs have continued to pull things off of the board and put them on to the CPU in the past that'll be the memory controller that IMC and then briefly it's kind of nebulous what's going on lately but briefly a fiber it didn't completely remove the vrm from the board you still needed it on the board but having five around the chip did complicate some things in some ways and did remove some of the customization in some ways from the board vendors so what happens well they can customize in a few things one is component quality that's the biggest one so just where do the caps come from where do the chokes come from who's making them are they any good so you can buy the cheapest FETs in China stick them on a board and it's not gonna overclock as well even if it has a ton of phases just because the fats aren't very good quality so that's that's important is how good are the components the individual pieces on the board the next thing is stuff like I standard stuff like IO that's of course a differentiating factor it's not that exciting of one because not hard to change how many SATA ports are on it or how many USB ports are on it that's more or less a PCH or chipset level thing and then you just assign the lanes to the device that you want as the board so that's one way but more importantly it's stuff like component quality the vrm design if you are buying something like for example a be 350 motherboard and you want to do a big overclock you really need to make sure that vrm is good because as I was speaking with build Zoid there are a couple boards out there where pushing a heavier overclock through a vrm that's simpler lower quality components is just going to generate a ton of heat and won't be as stable you might not be able to get as far but definitely generate more heat than on something like an X 370 counterpart in the am for world where you might have better components or just more phases and better component stuff like that other things would be small features that's how they differentiate themselves these days so that's stuff like software normally I don't like motherboard software but with Rison AI suite was actually really useful because the temperatures were very difficult to figure out in at least in the early days a bit different now still in the early days but not as early as then so motherboard software RGB lighting if you care about that that's a differentiating point but really again the the big things we've kind of gone over so short answer yes they are pretty similar these days but they still differentiate themselves so hopefully you can find something out there that suits the needs based on price next question is oh that's right I had a note here EFI quality and options available also matters a lot with motherboards because BIOS is where everything happens at a user level so hopefully it's a good EFI and also audio hardware that's one thing that they still have a lot of control over so if you really care about audio and you don't want to sound card consider that to mr. Derek has the next question asks for perhaps as a GN question do you foresee Intel becoming much cheaper in future as a result of Rison specifically with x99 or $1.99 lineup that is so I think I think you're looking at the right place I would I would guess that Intel there's a greater chance of them modifying their extreme series x99 type or x99 beyond products in terms of price or stack positioning than their sort of z series enthusiast grade products because just in terms of competition andy is competing most heavily with intel in that x99 class or whatever's beyond that so that would be where I would expect price changes like the one thousand dollar sixty nine hundred K might drop that would be where I would expect to see it or more likely whatever comes after the sixty nine hundred K its replacement because I don't know that they'll change the price this late in the lifespan other than maybe fifty dollar rebates or something but I would not expect to see a huge change today and something like a Z series ready processor like a 7700 K that seems to be pretty happy where it is and generally that's about three hundred thirty three hundred forty dollars somewhere in there now as for what r5 will do that remains to be seen depends on how competitive are five is in its class as I said on t DW I was on Joker's show hours before recording this as I said on his show the are fives based on the specs and what we know about the are sevens really will will will tear the i-5 is a new one for things like production for blender or premiere if you do it on the CPU and your alternative is an i-5 then the r5 is in theory you wait for us to test it before you buy anything in theory should be a whole lot better in terms of gaming that's a different story we'll see I I'm not gonna speculate on that right now I kind of did on his show but in terms of gaming different story so it depends on what Intel's targeting at the in the x9 class those are really not good for gaming when you look at the price the value is very bad for a sixty nine hundred K thousand dollar CPU you're getting basically seventy seven hundred K performance plus or minus depending on if the game cares but I see your clock rate or core count or whatever so those are bad value so in that way if it's a gaming targeted processor like a 7700 K I don't think Intel will really care that much right now but something like a production processor like the sixty nine hundred K that where it makes a whole lot more sense for Intel to change its pricing or its strategy for marketing or its next line up most likely like X 199 or whatever they call it that's where I think we'll see the changes so hopefully that answers that question that's all speculation but that's hopefully somewhat educated speculation last question is from Donald G who said any chance that we can get a chart showing your cat's a base speed versus overclocked on catnip maybe uh maybe Andrew can drop one of those charts in or something so you'll have you'll have that information for the future if you need it so thank you for watching as always a patreon.com slash gamers next stop was that directly you do not have to post questions in the patreon discord for me to see them I will check the counts of this video just used a lot of those this week because it was a while since the last one so leave your questions below if you have them and subscribe for more I'll see you all next time