Gadgetory

hey everyone i'm steve from gamers nexus dotnet and i am joined by scott watson former tax report and now AMD scott how long have you been with AMD so far it just since the beginning of the year so about 3 39 points yeah very cool and we're at this capsaicin event here at GDC before getting into that though all this coverage from GDC 2016 is brought to you by raw furious platformer game goner which you see on screen now so what's what's sort of the main thing with the displays we saw this LG display your time you about can you tell me more about that and tell people why anyone should care about it display right now oh yeah well the coolest demo we have here in for me and I you know I'm just into this stuff I'm just geeking out about this is we have a LG OLED TV it's a 55 inch TV and it's an HDR capable TV and what we're showing is a particular video that finally shows off we've had some demos of HDR but this one finally comes together all the elements to show off what we can do with the next generation of displays so this thing is an HDR content video it's 4k resolution it is high dynamic range it is high color gamut wide color gamut so it's more colors you haven't seen on to display before it is 60 frames per second so it's super fluid the pans and stuff and it doesn't do you know and it's it's tone mapped for the particular TV that is being shown on so its color correct and and range correct for that display and so what you'll see when you look at it it's something we can't put on camera because all your equipment doesn't isn't as good right but but it is just the best thing I've ever seen on an electronic display and we're able to show it running on one of our Polaris GPUs a little one that we demoed in Sonoma being decoded videos being decoded in real time and then sent to the TV over an HDMI to point out port so it's sort of the latest of everything and in this one case this little video loop shows you the potential for something that we've been talking about in terms of color gamut maps and math and all that but it's here on display so I'm happy to have it and this is different from the one that we saw at CES that right it's it's really progress on the same front there wasn't a video this good match to a display that was high frame rate that we had to show there and so this is just better so do the on the gaming side the developers have to do anything to accent you know to make use of the displays yeah so the interesting thing about the gaming site and we don't have it we have a demo now but we don't have any games yet running in HDR but the interesting thing about that is that because directx 11 is a high-precision API internally that requires lots of bits of precision per color channel that really what game developers need to do is simply tone map to the higher dynamic range displays all their lighting engines there's goodness in them right now and you're not seeing it because your display isn't capable so as this stuff moves along I expect that we'll see games that can tone mapped to HDR displays and give us more range and more color and not be like that annoying bloom that we had in the past that didn't really work out because the displays aren't capable enough I think now we're finally going to have that promise I you know realized and seeing just seeing the first video that does it you get excited about what's coming what's that what's the resolution of that display out there it's 4k so i believe it's 3840 x 2160 ok yeah I was curious because I almost when I saw them at CES or the the sort of earlier version at CES one thing we were talking about between our staff was I'd almost rather have the color than 4k if it's strictly between 4k or 1080 with the higher oh yeah Holly Collin I totally agree this is me personally but I would much rather have high dynamic range high frame rate wide color gamut then just more resolution right I think those things are more impactful and unfortunately there aren't a lot of examples of that in a while which is why I'm happy to show it here but when you see it you start thinking about your next TV purchase regardless i just bought a TV and I saw it a couple days ago in the lab for the first time and I was like oh like I don't know man like this summer new TV that's that's the problem with working in attack industry it is but but it's a beautiful thing let's let's roll over to frame times for a second so a completely different topic yeah but you are one of the you and maybe ryan trout are among the pioneers for frame time testing our viewers have seen us do these what we call 1% low and 0.1 percent low metrics I've kind of explained some of it but would you give a top level overview of why you especially now at AMD vs tech report think that frame time testing is important right well the work I did at the tech report was basically the basis for its why I'm here right Roger kudo e who runs the Radeon technologies group saw that liked what I was doing and asked me to come and help at AMD so I think there's a pretty strong endorsement there right and the idea behind it was a simple one we tested games for years and there were times when you play two games in the average FPS number or the low FPS number between sorry play one game with two GPUs those numbers the FPS numbers look the same but the experience was not the same you realize that and I I one point started looking into that and realized it's a very simple thing you have to deliver every frame on time to deliver smooth animation and an average conducted over a period of time masks variants that happens from frame to frame and so you need have a better metric you need to look at the entire distribution of frame times and ask the question you know was was I getting the frame on time every time as consistently as possible and so we built some metrics around that and I think one of them you guys are using is based on a kind of a percentile thing you know where that came from I was doing database benchmarking for servers and in service for databases you got to get every query back quickly well it turns out that like you can take some cheap little Zeon's and you can get a really good rate in a database benchmark but there are some queries that will take a long time to get back and so you're saying the ATM machine it takes a long time you're mad you get the big big Zeon's with the cash and everything and and okay it turns out that in that case even if your rate is lower you eliminate those long latency transactions I started thinking about that in the context of graphics it turns out that what you want to do is deliver every frame consistently just like you want to do low latency transactions and a database so we just brought over this percentile thing and asked the question it's kind of like the percentile is okay 99 percentile frame time is ninety-nine percent of all frames came back in this amount of time or less and you can kind of summarize general performance by picking a smart cutoff point and doing you know measuring that and so you get a summary of this entire distribution of frame times of super complex and one number that i think is superior to an FPS average right so and that's what you guys are doing and you've converted him back the frame time back into FPS I think in some of those guys right yeah that's right and then just play it along with the average and what you see is that your your 99 percentile is always lower than your average which tells you that the average is not really summarizing everything you you know it's nice to kind of get toward where things get hairy and get a sense of that right right yeah that's one of the things we've seen a very recent specific instance was with the g3 to 58 and GTA 5 Shoji 3258 with some settings really struggles with GTA 5 more than maybe a 77 60k or something like that and the reason was because even though the average was higher the one the lower percent the 99 99.1 percentiles were or point nine were so low that it was effectively unplayable right and yeah that's a small cache cpu with only two threads two cords right and so you have some constraints there and when when hits when the rubber hits the road when you have the hardest frames to generate then that relatively weak hardware kind of penalized you even though it has a high rate because it's you know I pc is okay and I'll get completed here but but it's really not the only performance property that you want is a high rate you need to be tolerant of difficult situations and if you can do that then you deliver smooth perform right so I think well we'll wrap up here Scott it sounds like a lot of the work you're planning to do at Andy is just now beginning only been here a couple months yeah so we certainly look forward to it I've enjoyed reading tech report you know all the years you worked on it and hopefully you guys found this educational hit the links in description below for more information and for content coverage of the specific capsaicin event will see you all next time