Gadgetory

hey everyone I'm Steve from gamers Nexus tonight and we're doing another ask GN episode I think we're on episode 6 now and we have some pretty good questions this week that I'm excited to dive into and all those are technical related except for one the one that is not is about the recent Star citizen drama for a lack of a more concise term so through Reddit and elsewhere I received the question are you planning on covering the current happenings with star citizen and that's specifically relating to the escapists allegations you could say against the star citizen team the cloud Imperium games team so just to get this out of the way right away at the top of the show here no we will not be covering it immediately there is a chance we will cover it in the future but not at this time and the reason for that is because when I started this site in 2008 it was my objective to really dive deep talking about content and how Hardware works how it interacts with games how games are made how they utilize that Hardware and occasionally we'll just talk about games not really into Hardware at all but the point is all of the content at least for the most part especially recently tries to go deep and talk about things with which we have hands-on experience or verifiable validated evidence things that we can talk to experts on and in the case of the current events with a certain media outlet and the cloud Imperium games team we just I don't feel like we have enough data to report on and I feel like all it does is add fuel to the fire without necessarily adding meaningful commentary so if if I don't feel like what I'm saying has any weight or usefulness in the current environment the current atmosphere of the games and hardware industries it's really not worth diving into from from my perspective so hopefully that makes sense we will not be covering it at this time as details emerge that could change the current standing of the claims from from The Escapist side from here in game side are very serious they have very serious implications for the game itself obviously they have serious implications for the game industry for journalists in the industry how this type of thing is handled in the future so it's it's not something that's an item to make light of it's not a movie to watch it's very serious and we want to treat it with respect in that regard so I'm staying away from it for now so that stated let's get into the fun hardware questions that I am pretty pretty excited to talk about here the first one is fairly straightforward human livestock asks my question is what is holding GP is back with 4k gaming is it weak GPU cores seems like memory bandwidth doesn't help much so starting with the end of that question first memory bandwidth doesn't help much is an interesting statement because you can point out the new video cards using HBM the fury X for example and see that it's tremendous bandwidth doesn't necessarily forward 4k gaming playability on that card with any really game-changing level of framerate disparity so the fury X for example is a pretty it's got pretty good your architecture it's very well designed it's got HBM doesn't necessarily make it a great performer that's something we talked about in the fury X review but in terms of architecture massive shader a all that stuff and it still feels like it's kind of stuck in some games when it comes to 4k gaming and that's in spite of having a huge memory bandwidth and very fast memory and new types of memory so to answer the question it is the cores the frequency of those cores how efficient they handle certain operations so ultimately yes it is the GPU itself holding holding 4k back more than the memory bandwidth necessary so hopefully that addresses that this you can kind of see in part by throwing more GPUs into a system where you don't get more memory you don't get more memory bandwidth and you you see a bit increase in 4k or 1440p performance and that is largely because of the way the cores are handled and because the extra processing power you get in such a configuration so we are still held back on 4k gaming for now it's becoming more possible you look up a 980ti you look at the fury X they can both play games at 4k it just kind of depends on what game you want to play and how high the settings go The Witcher 3 for instance is very demanding and not too kind to really any single GPU solution at 4k so that should address that decently alex maya coming back here for another question i think i addressed one of yours previously and alex says hi steve does ram you get matter at all for gaming for example 1600 megahertz versus 24 hundred megahertz eight gigabytes for sixteen gigabytes casa latency is nine versus ten or should I just choose the one that has the prettiest colors oh this I reported on this a couple times now the the back part of the question the prettiest color part I talked about this a few years ago after I talked to David Leon from Kingston at one of the PAX events and we talked about how RAM is a commodity now so yeah the color actually does kind of matter because it's become so sort of stale the development of the memory industry that color and appearance are starting to become relevant because the specs are really all very similar or the same or close enough that it doesn't matter on paper so yeah that is actually kind of important and it seems silly to say that but aesthetically you should buy a kit of memory that you like now you should also buy one that's backed by a manufacturer you can trust and has decent reviews and a lower return rate but generally the the better looking kits do coincide with the reasonably performing kits so in terms of the frequency a couple parts of this question the frequency if you're using an APU or an eye GP like the Intel ones then yes frequency matters density matters capacity not quite as much but it does matter and that's because the eye GPS and the APS do not have their own on card memory so we you buy a discrete GPU or a dedicated GPU a d GPU we'll call it that has dies of memory on the card itself and these use gddr5 which is very fast transactional memory it's a lot faster than system memory ddr3 or even ddr4 and it's also physically closer to the GPU so the GPU doesn't have to communicate through the bus through the chipset or the CPU through and then to the memory and then back again it's it's talking almost directly to the memory on the card and the CPU does get involved as it always does draw calls it gets directly involved there but its proximity wise very close to the card so it's a lot faster it's also just faster memory so in that case when you use a dedicated card you're gonna have way faster and way better memory performance than when you're using an AP or an IDP which has to access the system memory and to that extent frequency does matter quite a lot actually and we've seen performance differences of 10 percent ish in sort of the middle to high end with APs and IDPs using 1600 megahertz versus 1866 or 2020 133 so it does matter there for someone using a d GPU the answer is no not really we kind of see a little difference at the low end like 1333 which isn't really made anymore we're just 1600 once you get past that the differences get a lot smaller and they're smaller to the point that the money spent getting the next bump up in memory kit would probably better be spent on something like a better video card because the difference between a memory increase in speed and a GPU increase or an SSD added to the system is it's a big gap they're talking about density or capacity you're asked about eight gigabytes for sixteen gigabytes so there's something to memory we call density that is how big the die the memory thighs are on the actual PCB so those come in different capacities you see eight gigabyte sticks you see four gigabyte sticks to go right sticks that's what we call density a higher density stick if you buy 2 8 gigabyte ones versus 4 4 gigabyte ones you have 16 in either scenario and theory a higher density stick should be slightly higher performing for gamers really you're not gonna see that difference ever I mean it like never I would not worry about it there if you're in a really serious production environment and you're building maybe a lot of workstations for a render farm or something then it's time to worry about density especially if you're trying to cram more memory capacity into one system because then you need to higher density chips to actually be able to achieve 64 gigabytes or more or whatever you're trying to do the castle agencies do matter you do start sacrificing in frequency or latency depending on which direction you're going so that is an argument that can be made for for production workloads but for gaming again just get something sort of 1600 megahertz ish 1866 if you're feeling like spending a bit more if you have a D GPU and for the most part any cache latency with with those types of chips is gonna do just fine on a gaming setup so I would not worry too much about it there I wouldn't just buy the prettiest one though definitely target like a 1600 maybe 2x4 kit for the best outcome 1 by 8 you can get tired density but you lose dual-channel but that actually has almost no impact on gaming and we tested this it has very little impact on anything really except again production check the channel search it for dual channel dual dash channel and you'll see what I'm talking about there but no it doesn't matter too much these days the last question here is hi Steve I have a question that's a good start what is the difference between processor PCIe lanes and PCIe lanes in the chip set does adding a Wi-Fi PCIe card by 4 reduce my graphics card link with CPU down from 16 to by 8 so this is a pretty good question talk about skylake first and then look at the Haswell unit that the asker has with skylake the z170 chipset has twenty PCIe lanes on it it's got 26 HS i/o lanes high-speed i/o lanes and 20 PCI u8 included within that the 20 PCIe lanes are in clusters of 4 so there's 5 sets of 4 5 by 4 is 20 and to that extent you can't actually use them for an SLI set up because Nvidia requires by 8 so you can't use those extra chipset lanes for SLI but you can use it for things like m2 cards if you have an SSD and you want to get an m2 s m2 SSD you use those lanes there because those are by 4 at best right now if you get an nvme PCI Express card even though it's sitting in a PCIe slot on the motherboard it will communicate through the chipset and use the chipsets 4 lanes made available to it in the case of Wi-Fi cards like this question it will also communicate through the chipset because the chipset is handling all of that communication all the i/o and the CPU in this instance will allocate all of its lanes available 16 to the GPU now some CPUs have more than 16 lanes they have 20 or 24 just depends on which architecture you're looking at so in this instance no adding a Wi-Fi card with a by 4 requirement to your setup will not eat into your CPU Lane availability through the CPU itself the PCIe lanes it will go straight through the chipset and in this case the questioner is using an H 81 chipset which has a maximum of 6 PCIe lanes so it will use some of those six basically and you'll still get by 16 on the GPU that said if any of you find yourself in a case where you're in a situation that you lose some of the PCIe lanes to your graphics setup so you're going down to buy eight from by sixteen that's really not a big issue because the buy eight versus by sixteen performance the Delta is is pretty small it's basically a measurable for most games and graphics cards depends on the video card because faster ones will care more but even at the very high end it's a pretty small difference because PCIe three has a pretty high throughput and it's large enough that the interface is not the bottleneck here it's the video card itself is slower than the interface so you can really not spend a lot of effort being concerned about by British by sixteen obviously everyone wants by sixteen or if you're doing a single GPU setup just it's a little bit better it feels better too because otherwise it doesn't feel quite right when you're buying it but that should answer that so that's all for this week if you have questions for the next video post them in the comments below I check this video first for the next one person there if you like this type of content as always hit that patreon link the poster all we picked up a lot of supporters in the last week or so and for that I'm greatly appreciative to all of you and I certainly hope that you'll provide feedback if you have different types of content you'd like us to explore if you have people you want us to interview please post them below tweet us at gamers Nexus I will see that first and we'll try and set those up and see what we can do to produce some good content that is based in observable facts and researchable things so that's all for this time I will see you all next time