Gadgetory

hey Ron i'm steve from gamers nexus donna and we are doing another episode of ask GN i think we might be on five now so going pretty well definitely keep posting your questions about computer hardware and video games as they pertain to computer hardware in the comments below and we'll keep addressing those in the videos definitely some fun stuff comes out of it so first off there were a few questions about multi monitors in the previous video and i did see them i did read them and i do want to address them but i need to do a bit of studying on some of the aspects of the questions to make sure everything is completely sound when i'm addressing them so i will not be answering those in this video but i did see them and i do want to talk about it things i can talk about include DirectX 12 so let's just dive into that right away the first question today was from nishant shook area sorry you said thank you for the response the previous question another question I have is about multi-gpu in directx 12 some people are saying that with dx12 you can sli or crossfire and NVIDIA GPU with an AMD GPU in a single PC triple ! is it really true or are these baseless rumors so they're not baseless rumors whether or not it's true sort of depends on your definition of true and how things play out as the API matures and things like that so in theory it is possible to have both an AMD and NVIDIA GPU in the same system with directx 12 and theoretically even utilize both of those video cards for your game processing there are a lot of problems here one of them includes the difference of requirement for what constitutes a multi-gpu configuration by AMD and nvidia and video for instance currently uses an sli bridge and the no longer uses the crossfire bridge they've gotten rid of that and they go through the PCIe interface so that certainly complicates things but more so than that it's just the fact that you would need software to actually developed for such a configuration and tested for it it's pretty unlikely that those configurations will exist at least as it stands in the market today so games about purrs won't be tuning or optimizing or testing for those really at all which does impact the viability of that setup it also means that you'll need things like drivers and engines to be built for such a configuration two things that I also don't suspect will be happening in the current market so they are not baseless rumors it is something that theoretically can be done but the impact in the gaming environment will be probably minimal at least at the beginning because nothing's going to be built for it so I certainly would not plan on coupling and Andy and an Nvidia video card in the same system for your next build it's not something I would plan on but it's definitely cool and we'll be testing it as dx12 matures and things like that so good question there excuse me next one is from Andre who says how about plugging in oh sorry this is about the grounding cable so I recently posted a video about how to make a grounding cable to ground yourself meaning take all these static electricity out of your system before building a pc and the sister protect your components from ESD or electrostatic discharge that known Andre here commented on that video and asked how about plugging in the power supply with the switch on it turned to off and then touching it before you touch your hardware I heard this work too is this correct so it is correct ESD is a tricky thing to deal with because a lot of people will just sort of tap their case as their building and hope that that's enough the thing is here the case is not necessarily directly attached to align to ground and it's also going to be painted metal unless you're working with something like raw aluminum from Lian Li or something so when you're working with any kind of painted metal that is a much less conductive surface so even if you're carrying a charge you might not necessarily omit that charge to the piece of metal you're touching and you want to direct path to ground somewhere in the system with the grounding cable that I show you how to make in the video you are plugging into the third prong and US outlets it's different countries but in u.s. outlets it's the third prong its cylindrical you plug into that tap the wire that's exposed and then that'll ground you through the ground socket or the ground pen in the wall socket now hopefully the wall socket has actually been wired to ground some one of the viewers commented and said that in his apartment or his building or whatever the ground pin and the wall sockets was not actually connected to earth so wouldn't work in that case which is a problem but when you're looking at touching the power supply what you can do and this is what I've done in a pinch is take the alligator clip from your ESD or your anti-static wrist strap those yellow ones you wear and clip the alligator clip to the fan grill of the power supply this will normally be painted metal so keep that in mind it's the same issue but it's much more likely to work and you need to connect the power supply to the outlet and then you can just toggle the switch off so you just turn the switch off just for safety so you don't damage components by actually toggling power and sending power through the system when it's not ready but I toggle the switch off plug it in connect to the grill or something that you can grab with the alligator clip or really if you can touch it to that works but it's not something I like doing if I'm working with expensive components and I have killed components with ESD and that'll get you by if you don't want to do like a grounding cable or something more complex so yes that is the answer is that that is correct you heard correctly next question let's go Iowa said it's a very enthusiastic way to talk about Iowa I must say says hey Steve how likely is a Vulcan adoption compared to dx12 and how did the API is differ so both of these questions I will be addressing an interview with chris Roberts tomorrow he's the guy working on star citizen there are a lot of people working on star citizen but he's the the main deal so chris Roberts will be talking with me about Vulcan directx 12 and how they compare the feature levels and the applicability you to his game but of course the the greater market as well for those of you who have seen the chris Roberts videos I've done you know how they go it sort of just gets deeper and deeper into the discussion which is awesome so we're going to be talking about that but to quickly address this volkan adoption faces a few challenges the main ones are that Microsoft is a big company and microsoft owns DirectX volkan is a spin-off of OpenGL and mantle so it's so it's building on an existing API feature set it has a very similar feature set to dx12 and in theory it's more open well it is more open there's no theory about it and that's just because the way it's built so the thing here is that Nvidia and Microsoft's are both pushing Direct X 12 pretty hard especially Microsoft and that's going to be a challenge because of the way the industry works with the game developers the game developers are ultimately who will dictate which API stays and which one is stays in a smaller capacity basically so as long as that exists there's a problem with uptake on Vulcan and then there were rumors a while back about Andy being acquired by Microsoft's there's presently no data to support those rumors but theoretically if something like that were to happen then it would also impact the Vulcan adoption if microsoft acquired andy that i say it's all the way a second ago I may have said it backwards which is not going to happen if I said am the acquiring Microsoft the rumor was that Microsoft would acquire handy and if that happens which no base to that if it does that will in my opinion potentially torpedo Vulcan very early in the process that would be a challenge as well feature sets pretty similar but we haven't really seen Vulcan in action yet and Direct X 12 is only just now rolling so something I'm gonna be talking more with Chris about tomorrow and we'll publish the video hopefully over the weekend so that's what I have to say about that Alex Maya says is there a way I can correlate a fan speed that is connected to a PWM header which for those who don't know means pulse width modulation that means that the fan is controllable through the fourth pen on the fan header and he says can I correlate the pwm fan header on my motherboard to the GPU temperature the answer is yes so you can use something like msi afterburner EVGA precision i think asus has some kind of utility as well you can use one of those and build a custom fan curve the one I'm most familiar with is msi afterburner you open the fan control and the the advanced settings or wherever it is and you just drag points along a graph that have I believe its temperature on the temperature on the x-axis and then fan percentage speed on the y-axis so if you want to say keep lower fan rpms until you hit a more dangerous temperature like 80 Celsius 85 celsius then you can build a curve that ramps the RPM almost not at all or very slowly at the lower thermals and then once it hits a really high thermal you can spike your rpm if you're someone who's more concerned about consistency smoothness then you'll want to do a more gradual fan curve because this will impact how noisy it is perceived to you as a user so although a higher rpm will certainly be very loud the annoying thing to a lot of people who demand silence in a PC is actually the the difference between the time of the fan moves from one rpm to the next so in that case you'll want to build a smoother van curve that way more gradually increments and you are less likely to suddenly notice something in your ear as you're trying to play a game but yes you can control that and you should set up custom fan curb because it's pretty cool and it's a useful thing to do the dell give the dell catacomb sorry says that as GN is there a shadow play equivalent on The Andy side if not is there any low performance hit screen recorders yes there is an AMD equivalent and it is called GV r it is made by Raptor Raptor hired the Radeon pro guys to help work on it and DVR is something we've tested you can search the channel for shadow play or GV r or fraps if you search any of those three things you'll find the video i did and GPR has improved a bit since then but it is a much lower impact on something like fraps which just eats CPU it really doesn't do anything with GP parallelization which is a big problem for perhaps so GPR is more similar to shadow play ggrr is also compatible with nvidia devices I there's no real reason you would use it over shadow play especially because the performance Delta is a little bit worse when using GV r but it's possible and I guess there's a really reason to use it the real reason would be if you don't have a device that supports shadow play but you have an nvidia device like something that's not on Kepler Maxwell something maybe Fermi for example a 400 series video card so that's how that works gbr I can't remember I without my head how big the impact was but that video will tell you and I know that shadow play had an impact of between two and four percent to your FPS so it eats about two to four percent to do that in code and that's because it goes on to a separate h.264 encoder on the GPU die on the chip GPU or GPR rather does a similar thing it uses and these on chip encoder so very similar technology similarly low impact but it did have a bit more impact in some places than others where we're in video is more consistent but it's it's something i would recommend if you want to do screen capture without using fraps so that is the solution there those are the really shadowplay GPR are the best items there are other screen recorders I'm sure a few of you know them if you do post them below cuz I'm curious I'm not too familiar with recorders outside of those two I know there's hypercam there's Camtasia or stuff like that but I don't know that they're GPU accelerated and I know hyper cams not great for Game Capture so that's for my knowledge is on that check back soon for the chris Roberts interview all the other stuff this video might actually go up after I interview him interviews on friday this week so this video might go up like a day after that but either way check back for it check back for all the other stuff and thank you to the now 15 patrons we have on patreon it is a huge help to see you guys supporting the content director like that I am sincerely appreciative and it's encouraging because hopefully it helps us upgrade some of our equipment here I've ordered I have a new chair she can't see from this camera angle really but we have two of these we have a table so it's a living large gear and those will be used for multi-person video casts which I'm actually really excited about getting at least one other person involved so we can talk hardware or games or whatever do sort of a roundtable discussion there we've got a set well that's coming into so this is a great sheet as you would put on your bed but we're ordering a wood wall that's paneling and going to build it it'll look really cool pretty excited about that and I'm ordering two new light so we get rid of this shadow in right here that's some of you have commented on so things are exciting right now and a lot of that's because of the support from just viewing and commenting and of course the direct support from patreon check all that out in the postural video thanks again for watching let me know what your next questions are for the next video and I'll see you all next time