Gadgetory

everyone welcome back to another ask GN as always you can leave your questions for next time in the comment section below or if you're a patreon Bagri you can post them in the ask GN patreon chat channel or if you also want the extra version of ask GN after this with just a couple of the extra patreon questions you can support us on patreon where we'll distribute the second additional episode for sgn for this week so this one we've got a couple good questions there were quite a few people asking about X 370 versus X 470 testing for risin plus or risin to depend on what you want to call it so when we talk about that I've got a couple of other good ones like how do you balance criticism and not leave manufacturers mad for example is definitely worth talking about so we'll go through those for this week's episode before that this video is brought to you by thermal Grizzly makers of the conductor hot liquid metal that we recently used to drop 20 degrees off of our coffee leak temperatures thermal grizzly also makes traditional thermal compounds we use on top of the IHS like cryo not and hydro not pastes learn more at the link below first question is about X 370 versus X 470 so this was asked in couple places patreon most recently the discord is where I saw it posted and just to kind of address this early first of all yes we do have and have had a risin - or 2000 series or risin + chip whatever you want to call it we are technically not under the embargo for that CPU because we sampled it through other channels not through AMD however we are planning to launch our review at the same time as embargo lifts with all the other reviews so I'm not gonna go to detailed even though technically I could but what I will do is address the basic question of are you testing ax 370 versus X 470 the answer is yes we already have and will present that data when when the embargo lifts even though technically we don't have to but out of respect for other media will do it for this one so actually Sony where's 470 then I suppose the the main question is whether the platform change improves performance 1 for the previous rise in CBS and 2 for the new ones coming up because you could run them interchangeably on either platform and the answer is it kind of depends so without going into that all the test data and stuff right now the part where it depends is that if the motherboards are perfectly identical which we don't have two that are perfectly identical outside of the chipset it'd be easier to test but because motherboards tuned the lower unseen memory timings differently because there are other changes and how these socket behaves in terms of how much power it's pushing to the CPU current limits power limits things like that that are all under the surface it's a little harder to neutralize all the variables and tests and see is there just an outright difference a versus B there is a difference sometimes it's not what you would expect but we're still looking into it and a lot of this comes down to things like does the vendor for the motherboard you're using for the EFI version they have does the vendor force xfr to on by default the upgraded version of extended frequency range or XFR Verizon do they force that on by default do they force what power settings do they enforce for the CPU what kind of power limits do they have in place so these things impact the performance more than just a straight chipset change but we're doing our best to isolate all the variables and look at it for you that said you can't isolate all of them and ultimately at some point you are looking at differences that are almost more between the UEFI tuning than they are between just the chipset alone other than that there aren't too many chips that changes honestly we'll talk about that more later but there are definitely BIOS level changes from the vendors they've all kind of done some extra tuning they've had more time to allow Rison to mature actually 70 matured so x4 70 is looking a bit better things are stable on both platforms for us right now we haven't had any blue screens or severe crashes or defects or anything bad like that so that's encouraging to see but we'll clue you in on all the performance when we decide to post it which as I said will be basically in line with all the reviews we're mostly gonna follow that that embargo even though we don't have to but yeah subscribe to make sure you catch that answer the question though yes we are testing them we have tested them we'll have data for you when the review goes live so next one is from TJ CCB r-47 who said ask GN how to balance criticism and not leave manufacturers mad you lost coolermaster samples hard OCP lost on video samples guru 3d lost intel samples do you think it's fair not receiving samples or is it some kind of censorship this is a really good question it's kind of complicated but I'll condense it as best I can the last ones the easiest do you think it's fair not receiving samples or some kind of censorship it's fair to not receive samples we're not entitled to samples we're not entitled to free product review we're not entitled to loaner products to review if they don't want to send it that's completely within their rights it's not censorship at the end of the day it's our job in media to if we feel like they're trying to censor us or to use your word censor us or if they're trying to prevent us from reviewing a product that for some reason would be received poorly by us it's our job at some level to go buy it which we've done in the past I think we made a pretty big statement to everyone when we bought a Titan V I think that pretty much shows the extent were willing to go to now it's not always possible to buy samples and this also gets into a bigger a greater discussion of of launch timing because if companies cut you out of the review cycle because you've criticized them for some reason the the bigger impact isn't that you're not getting the product because most of the outlets if they had to could buy these things the bigger issue is that you might not be able to get it before launch so we can try and work with third parties with partners we have in the industry people we've known a long time to try and get something ahead of launch through an unofficial channel it doesn't always work out they often don't have the stuff that early either or have limited quantities so worst case scenario like with H 500 P mash we have to buy it when everyone else does and basically the same day or next day ship it and then get the review up ASAP so in doing that yes we were able to get the product we're able to review it we bypass any attempts at cutting us from the review process but we do miss that critical launched a window so each 500 B mesh I think we I mean just kind of based on experience I think we would have done about 30,000 more views if we posted it on launch day as opposed to a couple days later just to give you an idea so that is something that you feel an impact from as a media outlet fortunately as our channel and as other channels grow and you develop a following that trusts you some of that loss of initial views from a day one posting being missed is made up for just by having a really strong core audience that supports you and in our case will come and watch the H 500 PMS review for example even days after its launch just because people want to see what we had to say about it so there there is some give-and-take there's definitely if a vendor wants to punish you for saying something critical which they often do it kind of depends on which manufacturer it is they all behave a bit differently if they want to punish you for it typically what happens is this they'll often cut us or other people out from the review cycle for one to two product launches after that point you're pretty much guaranteed that they'll either grow up and get over it or the PR people may have changed because PR people in the industry change all the time it's kind of a revolving door someone at company a will be at Company B next month and as long as your relationship with the people is okay then you can keep those the the product sampling and relationships established as they move companies even if you're critical because if the people and they often do understand why we're being critical they'll do their best to advocate for us getting samples and I know some of the companies who've cut us out of the cycle in the past I've done that the PR people but it's often headquarters that puts the foot down and says now they're their meanies and we don't like it so don't give them stuff because that'll stop them but I write that so that's that's kind of the first half the question the rest of it how do you balance I mean to balance it we don't really cover much Kingston stuff anymore but I want to talk about Kingston so Kingston was the first hardware company I really worked with closely in a sampling capacity in the industry Kingston and Roseville and Kingston when I spoke with their PR our main PR contact at the time what he said to me when I asked a similar question was just be fair just just do your best to report on the product in a fair capacity if you encounter issues hopefully before launch contact the company talk to them establish is this my fault is it their fault is it a third party's fault is it Microsoft Windows being funny whatever the issue is try to talk to them about it and just make sure they're aware that you have a problem and as long as it's not something they can solve then yeah of course criticize it or make an issue of it or whatever as necessary but giving people a heads up like that and trying to work with them does a lot to making sure you keep getting sampled even if there's something critically wrong because it shows that you're willing to provide the opportunity for them to correct one of your mistakes mine in this case or to correct a product mistake if it's before launch and it's maybe a software issue they could probably push an update out if it's not too severe and get it fixed so if you give them that opportunity and don't blindside them on launch day then often a lot of stuff can actually get resolved and ultimately the goal is of course well it's theirs there are two goals for us one is that the product should be as good as it can be so if I can talk with the manufacturer and improve it indirectly before launch and the customer buys it and they get the improved version my job is basically half done the next part of the job of course is making sure they consumer is getting something they actually need and is quality so I guess the main thing I learned from the conversations with that PR rep and ages ago was if you're not trying to trying to put a dent in their armor and you're actually trying to work with them on troubleshooting the issue and establishing that it is an issue and you explained why your views are what they are everything's pretty much okay we had a phone call with coolermaster before our age 500 P original review went live I went over every single problem I had with it and their answers were unsatisfactory so that's why you saw the review you saw but I think that that answers a lot of it to recap here is it fair to not get samples yes it's they can do that if they want to it might seem petty it kind of depends on the situation but ultimately we know that the companies will cycle back through they'll come back eventually and you know I'm fine with criticizing samples and buying it myself I have to because if I were doing this to get free stuff all the time then I what's the point I get a different job has you got a look at why you're doing it if you're in this business to produce good content good reviews that are critical and analytical then do it there's no point in trying to pander to the manufacturer to keep getting free $100 cases or even $1,000 video cards because if you wanted to be in this job for the money you're in their own job might as well go work for a manufacturer and make two to three times as much money working half the hours that's how I look at it so from the perspective of integrity and having it just be fair be critical of the products if they deserve it and if the consequence is that you don't get it in the future that's fine tell everyone you don't get in the future and the manufacturer will receive the reputation for cutting people off from criticizing them and that will eventually turn around and bite them so that's I guess that's more or less how I look at it you just get you have to as an individual media outlet that is obviously smaller than the manufacturers you have to put your foot down and say no this is bad and hit them on the nose and tell them not to do it again and if they'll give you one so be it I can spend 150 bucks by okay it's not a big deal and also there are countless other products anyway that we could review instead so you know just the answer is be fair just be fair in the criticism and everything should be okay and if it's not then screw them and buy it yourself next one is from wraps up 100 who says why doesn't AMD sell GPUs directly on their site like Nvidia does I think wraps up 100 spin around in these ass jeans since one of the first ones actually why does so I think this is me kind of speculating based on what I know of the industry my kind of thoughts on that would be Nvidia has a lot more leverage than AMD over their partners look at the GPB reports so from Nvidia's perspective I what are you gonna do if Nvidia says we're gonna start selling founders edition cards and the partners are like actually could you not do that what leverage do you really have everyone who makes Nvidia cards is just gonna pick up your allocation if you don't have it it's it's not like it won't advance the partners to complain about it maybe if they all got together and complained or something I know but that's I guess how how I would see it and videos got the leverage to bypass their partners and sell directly they don't seem to undercut their partners too much there's clearly still a lot of cards being made by ACS EVGA everyone else but AMD although they have basically mandated that some of their past cards were a specific design like the fury ax which only ever had one officially permitted design at launch anyway that could that card was still sold by the partners even though AMD made it but it was never sold by Andy directly that I remember maybe they've done it for one or two cards in the past but I really don't remember anything recently so I think it comes down to leverage that would be my best guess on it and and where you can apply your leverage and what leverage you can pull as the biggest of the two manufacturers by large margin next one is from Terence jell-o jell-o who says is there a cost difference to manufacturers between free sync and gsync at a hardware or software integration level I see free sync integrated into a lot more products and products with g-sync seem to be more expensive I'm wondering why NVIDIA is trying to widen their market share with consumers but they're not as successful as AMD when it comes to providing incentives through third-party accessories like monitors so this is a good question we've talked about before g-sync is more expensive than freezing freezing is not free to implement or even to sell to the consumer but it's cheaper so g-sync has a two primary costs one of them is the fpga board that's on the monitor so they actually have a physical piece of hardware that goes on the monitor it's not necessarily cheap to make it that's the G sync module so that and that's what does the G sink processing on Nvidia's version of an advanced to be blank attribute under the is a DisplayPort specification HDMI either way it's a it's kind of like the V blank attribute that's leveraged for freezing and video will tell you it has a lot more advanced functionality and that it's smoother and things like that and that pain for the board gets you a higher quality that's their angle they basically they say we make a higher quality version of adaptive synchronization by providing a physical piece of hardware to do the processing so that piece of hardware is what is contributing to the cost and again note I said Nvidia says that it's their marketing on why there's why they think theirs is better the other cost is validation and this one applies to freezing as well so freesync is relatively free we had an interview ages ago with Robert Halleck at AMD I think it was either on camera or he was just off-camera answering my questions and when I asked him how free is free synced to the vendor the bonner maker he said well you still have validation cost but other than that it's basically free so yeah they do have to pay someone to test it to validate it make sure it performs to whatever spec they're saying it does that has a cost but it's not a physical piece of hardware so that's that's the differences in terms of why they why freesync is on monitors is cheaper than g-sync effectively 100% of the time and it's just no physical no fpga board next question Bandra mandragora's says what I'd love to hear from you is explain how is it possible that consoles with their weak processors and weak GPUs can achieve such amazing results according to what I read on the internet I would expect an FX 81 20 to be better than the Xbox one s or ps4 is processor and the GP is to have similar performance to a gtx 660ti or 660ti accordingly despite the console game is being watered down and optimised why is it impossible for equal or slightly better PC components to handle the games the same then goes on to talk about what consoles lack in advanced graphics this is a this is another good question that we've talked about in the past but just really briefly when it comes down to is the consoles you have an Xbox one you have a ps4 first of all both of those consoles are on Jaguar architecture it's kind of fortunate that they're both on the same architecture it's an AMD architecture for the CPU component so they're both on the same or very similar architecture and CPU fundamentals and that makes it easy to optimize for both of them secondly even with the one the one asks all the other derivatives in between ultimately when a developer builds a game for the Xbox one or the ps4 they are building their game for functionally one set of hardware now with the Refresh is there are some that are slightly more powerful but it's the same architecture at the end of the day and typically the difference is 4k or not so we can call it the same set of hardware when you're building something for one set of hardware it's a lot easier you know what every customer has so when you tune the game you build the game it's gonna work the same on every platform with PCs you have a million variables there are games where we've seen for example not long ago destiny 2 is a great example of one that affected both and the N Nvidia both companies released patches either around Bay or launch that improves performance on GP level with us with I think highest settings at 1440p by upwards of 30 percent or more and that happens because the developers didn't optimize the shaders in a way that worked the best on the hardware that was affected in this case all of it because it was destiny's here but with a console you don't really expect stuff like that to get through because you don't really generally give settings customization at least not to a level that would impact your validation process for performance and you also only have one piece of hardware to tune for it so optimizing for shaders the engineers the software developers really don't have to know a whole lot about the options out there because it's basically one and and then I would assume on the engineering side getting support from Microsoft or Sony or whomever is also going to be a bit more streamlined because you again have one piece of hardware to build for I would also assume there's probably better documentation for different rendering or shader optimization techniques that can be used for consoles that maybe don't work on every piece of PC hardware and that's why with some games you'll see the game perform really well on a particular set of AMD cards or particular set of Nvidia cards but maybe not they're older architectures because they weren't tuned for because at some point as a developer it all comes down to time and money you run out of time you run out of money and what are you ultimately going to build for you're going to build for the cards that are the most popular there were CPUs that are the most popular and then everything else if the game goes well I'll hope people Erie's patches for them but if otherwise you build for 10 series Nvidia maybe Vega and 500 series AMD and call it a day there which is why you see the optimization differences now also I should say this discussion goes further with things like api's so a lot of games are still DirectX 11 on PC those games don't have very low-level access to the hardware DirectX 11 is it has a lot of obfuscation layers between the game code and the hardware there are extra layers in between so if you think of it as a canonical view of a pipeline where you've got sort of like stop ABCD a and D are gonna be your code and your hardware and there's a bunch of stuff abstraction layers in between they're called whereas with a console it's basically direct to metal so DirectX 12 or Vulcan equivalents would be what you're using on console in terms of programming straight to the hardware without all the abstraction layers and that's a big deal with DirectX 12 invoking on PC remove a lot of that you'll see sniper and doom perform exceptionally well on PC hardware that's because they're low-level API is that have been used properly and a lot of DirectX 12 implementations on PC are just wrappers so they're just wrapping dx11 with it you end up with a slight performance loss or equal performance and that's why DX 12 doesn't always look good on PC but basically answering your question it's API and how the code is written and the abstraction layers it has to go through to get to where it's going which is the hardware and then tuning for one set of hardware I think that's most of it I'm sure a couple of you probably have some other stuff I've overlooked you're left out but feel free to leave it below for everyone else so next one Jonas or yonus I'm not gonna try your last name pet cat video think about g4 is now cloud-based gaming PS if you want to do a test I can give you my account I think we have one GeForce now it's a really good idea the idea that so when I originally talked with Nvidia about grid and other companies here's think about years ago about something similar the starting point for that is when cable companies had more control over TV the starting point was well imagine going to the most-hated company on the planet Time Warner Cable or AT&T or Comcast or any of the other ones and also being able to get gaming on demand from them not just movies on demand so that was kind of a starting point it was an interesting idea where if you've got a TV and you have a controller you lease access to the games for however much money they're willing to Algie for which is probably a lot because they're the worst companies on the planet but that was the idea and it's a pretty cool idea and that processing would be done through external servers hosted in their data centers hopefully somewhat locally and then you're just dealing with latency at that point which can be adjusted for so I really like the idea of it I don't think we're there today and part of that is because last I checked the upload and download speed requirements were still kind of high relative to what a lot of even America gets well I say here in America that's pretty bad here he set the standard but other countries as well of course so originally I think it was a 5 megabit per second up requirement which was way too high and and then we also had latency issues when I tried it last time where they put us in front of titanfall 2 and I just couldn't for the life of me aim at anything because the the response to the input was just to delayed but for a game that's not titanfall to you like maybe the witch or something like that you'd be ok so I think it has a ways to go I'm very interested in the technology I think Nvidia's implementation is a good one where they have external servers that process everything I would like to see latency improved which they're working on and and then a business model that makes sense because originally the prices were too high but they dropped them so not yet they're not not there yet ok last couple ones we've got in version who says pardon for the not so serious question by any April Fool's plans in mind nope next question second last Jedi why don't we see VR benchmarks how does CPU affect the our performance is a 6600 came out for VR 7700 K going to be much better 6600 Kay's well Oh 6600 K you'll be ok for the most part we have VR benchmarks we actually think it's the channel like main video right now just go to the channel and search for probably be our benchmarks or 7700 K if you Google search it's 7700 K versus r7 1700 gamers Nexus VR benchmark you'll find it so along with a couple of other outlets PCP included we were some of the only people to have really in-depth VR testing where we had frame times we had frame drops versus in synthesized frames versus warps misses and all these cool variables and elements and metrics for VR the reason you don't see a lot of it even from people who have it figured out like us PC / anyone else who did figure it out is because it's hard to do and also the the view count is not great either so you're dealing with hours of setup just to get the testing ready to go and then testing takes a long time you need to test for longer intervals it's also difficult because I have to physically put the headset on walk around and do the testing which means I need to clear the room out I need to adjust for employee schedules even because it basically requires that I have the lab to myself to do a VR test and then further you have to take breaks every now and then because otherwise it is possible to get a pounding headache from testing VR for say 8 hours and dealing with low-end hardware that might have stuttering and things like that it's really not comfortable so it's difficult to do it takes a lot of time to set up and you'll probably lose money but it's okay to do maybe quarterly or something like that which is kind of how we've approached it next one there last last to last to X 0 for 1 Steve loved the Shelf in the background looks great thank you will you be testing reviewing dear Bauer's sky like extract iframe yes we have one it is a pre-production sample I need to get a final review production sample from their Bower I think he's sending one and then hopefully we can do that we had a we had to work on the clearance I basically need to sand off some of the pre-production model because it's very slightly different from the production model that you all would be buying last one mmm Lee what's wrong with the wood backdrop shelves trying to keep up with J's display yes well as you all know we once filmed something in front of a peg board with pegboard with tools on it and someone called us out and said Linus invented peg boards and that we were copying him so it looks like unfortunately we're gonna have to stop filming in front of the shelves because J also invented shelves and and we did not license shelves from J so J I'm really sorry I didn't mean for it to go this way but hopefully you can understand we just we couldn't afford your licensing fees so it'll be gone I guess next video pack it up thanks for watching guys subscribe for more go to stored on cameras nexus net to pick up one of the new mod mats they have a black background now and some other changes we did a video on it and also patreon.com slash gamers and axis tops that directly and get access to the second video with some extra patreon bagger questions I'll see you all next time