Gadgetory

so yesterday in a video about Andy relive and Nvidia shadowplay I said that we would send today have an update on Oh cat which is Andy's overlay on top of present Mon that they have developed to make it easier to benchmark dx12 and low-level API applications like Vulcan so that's what we're talking about today now unfortunately because of bugs that I ran into with Oh cat we don't have the full analysis but I still wanted to explain how it works and what and these goals are and how it hooks into present amount of what presentment is I'm joined by our senior ok analyst here obviously but that's the idea for the content so hopefully this at least gives a preliminary look at the software what it does how you can use it but for the benchmarking that's gonna have to wait until after it's not buggy anymore before we get into that this content is brought to you by our patreon backers thanks to those of you who are supporting us on patreon you can check the link patreon.com slash gamers and axis if you like our content and want to help directly so very quickly what is Oh cat Oh cat is Andy's approach to basically present mon-sol if you don't know what presentment is let's go over the tools first for benchmarking tools right now your options are basically things like fraps which despite being aged and a bit decrepit actually works really well for benchmarking anyway so captures frame times it's important and it captures frame rate and then you can pretty easily validate that data against other tools now fraps uses the variable called on present as opposed to the on display variable that's closer to the engine so on present is more representative of the framerate as it gets spit out of the engine and then on display is the option we don't use but it's fine as long as you're consistent in the use of whichever variable you may be measuring with fraps doesn't do on display to my knowledge so that's kind of traditional what people use but on display we don't use we use only on present for everything present maaan uses both of those variables that's good that means that you've got both possible methodologies and the side note when you're comparing benchmarks between different websites this could be part of why the numbers are different sometimes they shouldn't be kind of within a scale but like total side note so present Mont why is that not more globally used well it's really cool because it's open source and it's by Intel and Microsoft and also because open source and it's by Intel Microsoft and it's not a sold product they have no reason to develop something like an interface this was this plugs into things like etw and you can really easily hook into the OS or hook into whatever API may be being tracked dx12 works with Foulke and it works with the x11 OpenGL it works with everything so it's really cool but it's not super widespread and that's because present Mon out of the box or out of github as it were you've got to download the visual studio which isn't difficult it's super trivial to do and actually compile everything very easy to do but that's a step that is intimidating to some folks certainly those who might not be doing benchmarking for a job but just for a hobby or a passion or something like that so that's one step that's kind of in the direction of obfuscating how to actually use the tool another step in that same direction is with present Mon you do it all through command line it's really not that hard but again it's an extra step and it's easy to screw up if you don't really pay attention to the commands that you're writing we've been doing this for months now since dx12 and volcán kind of came about because you can't use fraps the benchmark those games and you can't use traditional tools at least not well afterburner I don't always trust doesn't always hook into the game lots of problems so we've been using present' mod I trusted a lot more it hooks into you you WP pretty reliably hooks into all the other api's but it's difficult to use for most end users I think and probably some media depending on the level of technical knowledge and time they can put into it so that's present Mon it also creates really detailed CSVs and you can do a lot with these CSVs but again same thing if you don't know what you're looking at it's really intimidating and you're probably gonna be like ok so what's my fps I don't get what are all these frame times I don't what do these mean so we have our own Python scripts that analyze these CSVs you don't need python scripts to do it but it makes it easier you can use an excel template I made one of those previously that runs the calculations but our Python script is way more if so that's present Mon now Oh cat is AMD's attempt at building an interface for it as I said present Mon is open-source and these Oh cat is built on top of the very generous present Mon license the license that they use anyway and that means I can use the source code means they can distribute Oh cat as a completely contained tool so you don't even have to get present Mon separately it's all contained in this okat exe and it's an installer which is also really nice makes it easier you don't have to compile anything or install Visual Studio or anything like that it also adds an interface through an overlay so to get overlays working in games you basically you have to create what's called a shim it shims in normally traditionally somewhere between the API and the game and that's not necessarily quite as easy with the new API s hence these new tools coming about so present mana is the heart of oak at this means that in theory the results should be effectively identical and should be fair so you really shouldn't have to worry about vendor favoring with for example and the building a tool that would make them look better that's not what's happening here in theory and they are going to open their source code later so we can actually inspect it but that's neither here nor there so the idea is that they're building on present Mon which is already trusted and known good and they're offering an interface and there's some slight overhead but it's not bad it's maybe fractions of a millisecond in the frame times and I think they've pretty much resolved all those issues by the time they push this 0.9 whatever beta version of the software they have now so ok in terms of the overlay options it puts up in the top right corner you've got your FPS and your frame times for the current milliseconds whatever you're looking at actively and push a hotkey to record and stop you can set a delay timer not a delay timer I wanted the late timer I've asked them for one you can set a time expiry which is how long will benchmark before it expires and stops the benchmark and then once it creates the files you've got CSVs that are the same format as present model which is really important because again it's presentment so of course gonna be the same format but they don't screw around with it they don't move any any data or any columns or anything like that so the same CSV that means our same tools can comprehend it and now put our own average 1% 0.1% little values and anyone spreadsheets can comprehend it without updates so there's all good news basically it makes it easier to use makes it easier to benchmark it hooks into dx12 it hooks into volcán having a lot of bugs within the house like I said so today I can't been to work battlefield 1 with it it's just not working present Mon seems to be working fine so some issue in there with Oh cat and that's what kind of put a blocking issue in front of our video and article for today was that issue so doesn't work quite well in battlefield one right now as following the latest bf one patch and by quite well I mean at all at all so I was having issues with it in GTA 5 it was just not hooking into the into the game at all and then we've had some issues elsewhere as well there's it'll work eventually I guess well unfortunately these problems came up after the actual announcement was made for Reliv so it's not working right now he can't benchmark it but that's the idea and it does also work with on presenting on display same stuff and if you really don't want to look at the huge CSV then I suppose you get a slight benefit with okay and that it produces kind of a collected summary file so that's how it works so that is all for now check back soon I don't know when yet we're waiting on Andy to update the software so hopefully it'll work with battlefield one okay that's the big one I want a benchmark here because it's pretty recent and GTA 5 just to have a DX 11 okay then pop you'll hear benchmark that we can throw in there check back soon I guess otherwise we'll have normal ass yen and all that content coming up shortly patreon link of the post trail video to help set directly it links in the description below for more information subscribe for more I'll see you all next time we should well demonism well 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