Gadgetory

everyone welcome back to another ask GN you can leave your questions in the comment section below for next episode or if you're a patreon backer on patreon.com slash gamers Nexus you can post your question in the discord chat where I try to read them every week so this we've got a couple interesting topics on game performance and FPS capping what happens to your extra frames when you cap the FPS as one of the actually really good questions maybe without even intentionally doing so the user inspired a lot of discussion behind the scenes but before getting to all that this is brought to you by EVGA s at CLC 280 liquid cooler 4 CPUs which we previously benchmarked and found to be a high performer given its relative silence the temperature output learn more about this $140 cooler at the link in the description below the first question is an interesting behind-the-scenes topic from our video where we updated the render rig I don't want to point this one out in video format answered it a bit in the comments but a couple people asked or suggested switching software from Adobe premier to something else sometimes there are more expensive sometimes they are less expensive sometimes there are interim solutions and a lot of people seem focused on the cost of the software but as an interesting point from a business perspective or a business owners perspective I wanted to highlight here that do wait c'mere first of all is incredibly powerful it does a whole lot of stuff really well and we know how to use it that's the big thing it doesn't do something as well like hardware level optimization for instance it could certainly be better there some of its competition is better there but the thing is for us we could do something like learn an entirely new program which isn't free its if I ignore the cost of program I have staffing and personnel cost we have to train up people to do the video editing in that software I'm probably not gonna have time to learn it which is potentially problematic because I'll no longer be in a position to offer any kind of additional hands-on if needed but more importantly there's a time cost and a training cost for learning the new software and there's a good chance it won't really do anything more for us than premier does other than potentially render faster and so here's our we're the business side of it comes in for something like that if I'm looking at I can improve my render performance CPU bottleneck side by just throwing more hardware at a box and spending some more money and being done with it that's what I'm going to do it might cost me 500 more dollars or a thousand more dollars they can cost me 1500 more dollars to build a system that will render significantly faster but that's a one-time insignificant cost compared to buying new software learning how to use it ourselves which is a sort of snowball effect cost because now not only do you not know how to use the software and your team doesn't know how to use it so you have to pay for their time your time to learn how to use it you also pay indirectly by having a slower content pipeline now all the predictions about how long it takes to do something wrong so that's a problem as well so no we're not going to switch software Adobe Premiere is really good it's just not that optimized for certain types of rendering that we happen to do but the solution is to throw more hardware at it and that's something that we're fully capable of fortunately that is kind of that's where our business is focused so this is very fortunate for us because unlike other businesses where they might not be as Hardware driven as we are we're able to solve the problem pretty much overnight or within minutes a lot of time so that's why we're still using premier and it is good software it's just it's really easy to make fun of ports I don't know if lack of optimization is really the correct way to say it but disappointing level of optimization maybe is so that was one thing I want to point out same thing for one of the other questions which was from a madhouse woola Willard Willard who said for your big rendering task why do you not use the Linux kernel you may find a significant performance boost with a blender same thing there you only have two resources really time and money and only one of those can you get more of so if we can just kind of spend more money to do things faster that's fine Linux we used to build the web server so not a foreigner to Linux but also Windows is already installed on all the machines of that render took 20 hours so why optimize it when it's you let it sit overnight and it's done anyway there's no real point in spending time screwing around with an environment that we're not really familiar with enough to do efficiently and confidently the first time you're really just better off doing what you know if it's going to be a one-off quick project because those animations we only have to render them once and then they're done fortunately so let's get into the next questions the real ones that are off topic of GN and back onto Hardware this was the really good one that I was excited about answering and I sent out some requests for assistance and understanding the best way to answer this but I will get to that in a moment scooby-dooby I believe on discord asked Steve what is the correlation if any between high FPS fps highs excuse me and FPS lows specifically as they relate to CPU or GPU performance and even more specifically to i-5 like in GTA 5 ask because I found in my personal experience that limiting the maximum frame rate in the game I can eliminate game-breaking FPS lows and have a smooth experience I've often wondered but haven't tested what the effect would be to ignore or sorry to average FPS by limiting the maximum fps in such an instance would it be possible to have a net gain of average FPS by limiting max FPS so we've got a whole separate sheet for this because it required some thought some conversations and I spoke to Tom Peterson from Nvidia about this a little bit because this is a topic that is he's pretty experienced in having worked on things like the frame phasing testing back in the day with the first version of FCAT and then more recently with F cat VR so good resource there but I just to break down the question the way I read this basically boils down to what happens to the extra frames when we cap ourselves 60 or 100 FPS might be your cap and if you do that do you just deliver the first 60 frames in the second that the hardware is capable of rendering or do you pace it out and deliver the 60 frames evenly spaced from one another so that you get a smoother experience and says scooby-dooby suggested so that's the question and there are three ways to cap Fame rate in the game so the two main ones are known vsync you cap it just by turning on vsync and now you're locked to the refresh rate of your monitor and that one's it's a monitor back pressure that we've talked about in the past when g-sync and fries Inc were really hot topics the next one is by game engine throttles which are getting a lot more common lately so you can find one of these in dota 2 dota 2 has a default limit of 240 off caps overwatch has an FPS limiter as well I think goes to 303 or 300 battlefield one has an FPS limiter a lot of these games do that's a game engine throttle and then you can do GPU driver based frame caps through the api's and the end Nvidia both have some level of driver side frame rate cap or frame pacing and videos uses the env API so that means that it can plug into afterburner or precision as well so you may have a third party solution that can cap your frame rate and that is done through the NBA P I in their situation or Andy has their own tools as well so doesn't you remain three ways to limit the frame rate in a game vsync is a solution that gates the drain rate of the CPU so the CPU render thread runs vsync slows down the rate at which you present frames the back buffer in the GPU will sit with a completed frame until it's time to deliver that frame which will be on the monitor refresh interval for some terminology the front buffer and back buffer are both address spaces on the physical memory on the video card comprising the frame buffer and they flip their pointers when it's time to present or the specific present call that is made once a frame is ready the back buffer contains the final completed image and that's what you eventually see where it gets interesting is the game engine level throttling so in this instance the main loop of the game engine encounters a CPU pause and that CPU pause delays the start of simulation for the next frame and that happens on a specific CPU thread for the game the game thread or the simulation thread more civically whereas your other threads might be something like the render thread and the render thread is responsible for feeding these shapes and the objects to the GPU for being drawn later so that would be the render thread that's one of the busiest threads in a game and is where you get your draw calls out of so the simulation threads what we're mostly interested here and that is largely responsible for the progression and pacing of animation frame the frame so we care a lot about what that's doing and when it is doing it let's say we impose a frame rate limit of 60 FPS on the game engine not using vsync but using the game engine limiter with a 60 FPS limit we're not going to be delivering frames more frequently than once every 16 point 67 milliseconds the game frame rate throttle uses this pacing to determine its animation progression so at the beginning of the loop the CPU checks the current time against the time of the last frame delivery which is output as a delta T or delta time this delta T is used to determine whether it's time to go back and work or whether the CPU simulation thread can remain idle the CG render thread is still doing work during this and is responsible for supplying parameters for shapes to the GPU that it ultimately draws the game FPS caps are the front of the pipeline so the simulation thread waits until the desired delta T value is reflected simulation happens before rendering does and paces our animation a 60 FPS cap is a frame every sixteen point six seven milliseconds 120 fps is roughly every 8.3 milliseconds and so on and you can calculate this simply by dividing 1,000 milliseconds that is by the desired frame rate and that's output in milliseconds during this idle time for the CPU game simulation thread we're not spinning up and spewing frames out at the frame buffer or front buffer back buffer for storage what's happening is rather than generate a bunch of excess frames that get discarded we're generating fewer frames overall and just meeting the cap as long as the hardware can keep up which is a big assumption here that's necessary for talking through this so only the appropriate amount of work is being done for each frame this is why in some instances you will see power reduction power consumption lowers because you're limiting the amount of frames going out that makes sense but more importantly and fitting with the user's question you'll see a smoother experience as long as you're able to hit that limit 60 FPS for example because in this case you're not really worrying about all the extra fingers anymore you're not just spitting out as many frames as it can be generated instead it's one every sixteen point six seven milliseconds or whatever it may be and then you sit idle as the CPU simulation thread and wait for time to draw the next frame so provided the hardware can keep up with the frame rate target the results should be a fairly smooth experience with minimal tearing since the game engine or vsync engine will more or less create a back pressure to limit the frame output so now your average FPS shouldn't really be higher necessarily by capping the frame rate it is possible depending on the behavior of the particular game and the GPU certainly if it's working hard enough and there's some driver level issue or something like that you may encounter an occasional frame where you've got a spike of 500 milliseconds or something really awful and experience ruining but generally that shouldn't be happening so overall your average FPS shouldn't really be higher for the most part however you might actually see better frame latencies or more consistent frame rate these are frame times as we call them because your interval interval between frames will now be consistent based on the frame rate cap that you've set in the game if it's 60 it'll be every 16 point 67 milliseconds there will be no more and no fewer as long as you keep up so be smoother looking overall as an alternative solutions like fast sync or something like that try to pick the best frames by eliminating tearing but keeping the higher frame rate that's a completely different topic and you've got adaptive sync technologies that are hardware driven g-sync or in the attributes of a monitor like free sync which is B blank and those do a little bit different way because you're not relying on a game engine to do the work you rely on other variable to do the work but that should pretty much set the stage for the question the fantastic question I love having to go out and find answers from people in the industry and this one deserves some extra work so thank you for that one let's move on to the next question the next question is from sir papa on YouTube who asked question connects sgn in your previous video you talked about using three GPS for rendering does the CPU even matter at that point when all of the workload is on the GPUs for the most part the answer is no not really as long as the CPU is able to keep up enough to perform basic instructions and commands and keep the GPUs tasks with work you're going to be fine so in that particular video we were looking at a blender render and the only way that the CPU would really be useful in that specific case aside from basic tasking of the commands would be if you were to render another set of frames on the CPU for example you render frames one to 30 on the GPUs and maybe frames 31 to 35 on the CPU just because it's going to do it a whole lot slower so why give it an equivalent amount of work but that's really the only place that comes into play with that particular workload now this changes based on what you're doing of course with premiere for example you really not going to accelerate more with more GPUs as we've found so the Seabee does actually still do a ton of work in premiere but depending on the type of stuff you're rendering if you can kuta accelerate a lot of it or OpenCL accelerate a lot of it you really take the emphasis off of the CPU for something like 1080p 60 ABC HD encoding with limited CPU related work loads from effects you end up with a CUDA or OpenCL acceleration where the CPU becomes a whole lot less relevant to the point where and some of our testing we've shown with an i-5 and CUDA you can render something as quickly as an i-9 7900 X and CUDA or a rise in CPU and CUDA all of those were 20 minutes in that particular workload it just depends on what you're doing though some stuff is more CPU bound than others this next one was another one I had to go out and seek some thoughts from manufacturers your wolfs then gave me and said I guess there's a more question for case manufacturers but I was wondering if you knew why case manufacturing companies fax on fantastic aim a few seemingly have almost what could be described as random color choices for the cases while simultaneously ditching the colors at other points that people really like I'm aware that it may cost them more paint wise so why not give us the option for a slightly higher cost you know like fan tax into pro cases did where white was $10 more than the black variant so this was an interesting question as well first of all color is pretty hard to do black is easy because it's well one it's a really safe color you know it'll sell because most of the cases are either black or white so if you do black or white you're going to fit in with the in-crowd you're probably going to really not be limited on sales by color you'll be limited on sales by design or something like that but hopefully you've gotten right the next thing is even with the white case it's really hard to get that color correct so when you have different materials like plastic one type of plastic versus a steel it's difficult to match them and that will really show up in the right or the wrong light when you're looking at the case to the point where when we've gotten pre-production samples sometimes the tone of the white or the tone of the generally non black colored cases Gray's fall into this as well will show a difference when you look at the metal side panel versus the plastic top so that's a challenge and I'd cost money to fix a couple notes from the manufacturers we spoke to one of them was a pretty good point that said tooling shipping inventory all that comes into play and a lot of people may not realize that which is definitely true inventory is a big cost that's not really factored in here and then there's a risk of manufacturers choosing a color that retail channels just might not want to carry maybe Micro Center or Fry's or Best Buy or whoever doesn't want that color case because they don't think their audience will buy it and what happens sits in a warehouse forever perpetually as retailers online might take the cases with more interest but they still assume some risk with it if it's not just a standard black or white that they know will sell and then the next thing is the buyers who actually are responsible for purchasing the product that goes through the retail channels they're called buyers at the websites Newegg Amazon Fry's ncx any of them if those buyers don't think that the case will have a good run rate they'll basically just not buy it end of story so now you're left with the thing your shelves in the warehouse where you've got another SKU an inventory that you have to track and more physical space the product like in cases takes up a ton of space that sits there and eats cost just by way of sitting there another point brought up was some of the if manufacturers feel like their run rate will cover the cost of producing the item they'll make it or might have a certain SKU that's already done well so they know that there's a demand for a certain color and that's where you get companies reproducing the same color over and over because they know it will sell well to their audience manufacturers can drop the margins to as the the run grows as you produce more product of the same design or color so the example given to me was if you have a cooler like the cooler master hyper 212 where they've ordered nearly or over a million samples at this point and they know it's going to keep selling your your margins go up because you can produce a lot more and lower your cost it's really it's the same with pretty much all level manufacturing even just making these shirts like we make the cost scales with the amount that you produce because if you think about it from the manufacturers perspective whether that's a factory or a shirt printer the people in charge of that assembly line or production line have a set-up cost it costs in our instance it cost the shirt printer a certain amount of money and time to get the screen ready a silk screen or to get staff on hand to worry about logistics and once that cost is out of the way you worry about producing the product so the more you can produce Perron and get that startup cost consumed by the amount of products being produced by using the line for longer because you're using that startup time for longer and the lower the cost is to make the product so the point of saying all that is talking about just adding a few dollars for color might not be enough you might be talking something like a 50% increase to make a color customizer on a website where a user can pick green or blue or red or yellow or really any color so the cost can go up astronomically once you start doing stuff like that and they really want to limit it to one two maybe three colors and at that point why straight from stuff that you know will sell that's the hard part is as always the point you have to make as a designer or something like that is you know if we make this thing and we take the risk of the extra color it's really got to be unique enough and we have to drive it enough and marketing to make sure it moves off the shelves so that's a that's the main set of questions a couple more quick ones black tower four or black tower asked four days ago I would appreciate the zotac 1080 TI thermal pad and backplate mod video guide thanks yen there's not a lot to say so you basically if you watch our teardown you'll see how to take the card apart once you take it apart find the place where that little rubber bumper is remove it and get thrown pads that are the appropriate height to put in there I'm not sure exactly what the height is because I had to send that card back but I think we used a 0.5 millimeter and a 1.0 millimeter surround pad and that made contact really pretty easy though tag is on record on their own subreddit saying that they would honor warranties if you did that as long as you restore it to its factory condition before you send it back so you're not going to void the warranty by doing that mod according to them directly on their own subreddit next quick question was a Clayton Fife who said Verizon 1,700 acts with Beats you hit the tomahawk should I trust rising masters 76 Celsius or CPU 10 and a hardware monitor when I was sick Celsius when overclocking there within 5 C stock it's hard to trust any software with dermals for any CPU with Intel we have to spend a lot of time just looking at the different tools and figuring out which one we trust the most and sometimes that's easiest done by putting a shim in there and measuring that with a thermocouple and comparing the numbers for AMD I'm still not positive which ones trust you would think rise and master would be pretty accurate because it is the AMD solution however I found hardware info 64 the one of the most if not the most accurate tools for working with rising processors this was a software solution recommended to me originally by Andes tech marketing team so we started using it and it has a measure in internment in there called T die that's the one you want and you can go off of that for your readings so I think that's pretty much it the only other thing to say is as always leave questions in the comments section below stay tuned for all the coverage this week and go to gamers access squarespace.com to pick up a shirt like this one you're wondering about them now that we've talked about shirt processing as part of a case color selection and as always subscribe for more I'll see you all next time you