Gadgetory

welcome back to harbor unboxed I am well I'm at Tim's wonderful set so must be Q&A time Tim says we have a lot of questions lined up so that waste any more time let's go get into them okay first question here from a discord member it's mister boland again I noticed that in your Resident Evil 2 optimization guide you notice that none of the AI options were particularly good this is for Tim so why is it that in some games settings such as SM ma look great and in others they can make the game look terrible so tell us Tim yeah well I can't say I'm a game development expert so I guess this is just based on what I've seen across a number of games it's the main culprit for AAA techniques looking bad seems to be taa or temporal anti-aliasing and that just seems to be a range of ways that different developers implement that technique into their game so for a game like Resident Evil 2 their implementation is pretty soft pretty blurry does a lot of smoothing so obviously that's the style that they wanted and liked in their games so that's what they chose to implement a game like battlefield 5 or shadowing the Tomb Raider they also use ta Abe it's a little bit different there's obviously different parameters you can tweak with each of these anti-aliasing techniques so in those games it looks a lot sharper and obviously they've put a bit more time into developing those techniques that's for SMA that's a little bit different in the way that it you know tries to sharpen and preserve detail compared to anti-air things you want both of those techniques preserve and yeah it just depends in some games there's a lot of sort of shimmering effects you can get with the way they implement you know alpha effects and that sort of thing the different textures that can all sort of trigger the sort of shimmering that you might get in a game like Resident Evil 2 with SMA so it just depends on the assets that they're using across the game with those techniques as to whether you know SMA looks good or whether it looks bad so yeah it's a real game by game basis as to what is the best anti-aliasing technique for a given game I think it's safe to say that if you can super sample again that's still still the best technique that we've got okay good question for you here's Steve from our discord chat can you explain in further detail the difference between allocated memory and memory usage as it related to V RAM probably about the six gigabyte thing yeah I come to this briefly I probably can't go into it really in to much more detail here for the Q&A would have to research all the correct terminology and everything is going on but in short allocation is what the game well it is aware of the resources it has available and then it will allocate according to what it thinks it needs and the advantage of allocating more than what it's currently using or exactly what it needs is that ensures that those resources will be available if need be so you don't run into things like stuttering and whatnot and then usage which we can't actually measure at all there's no possible way with the tools that we have available or any of the other tech media to measure current exact memory usage so we have to sort of do that it's guesswork but if there's any missing or blurred textures if there's stuttering on a six gigabyte card a post on a gigabyte card so we can really only measure allocation that's where a huge amount of confusion comes in because a new game will come out like a and certain games will allocate everything like the Call of Duty series does that with most settings and then some games are quite conservative with what they allocate they seem to allocate pretty close to what the usage will actually be but when a new game comes out and it allocates loads and loads of memory people think that's justification for needing a gigabytes 10 gigabytes or whatever it may happen to be but as I found in my recent explosion video looking at the six gigabyte vram buffer and then comparing that to I think it was an acre you buy it for your own buffer at the moment especially for 1440p with you know you your HD texture packs and things like that 60 gigabytes does seem to be perfectly fine but when that will change I don't know it probably might be too far into the future but you hinted at that's probably going to relate to console memory buffers and things like that yeah if all we see it mainstream usage push over 6 gigabytes yeah I can't get into too much detail on that one I would have to do a lot of research to bring you an actor a Content piece on that but hopefully that helps anyway okay on the subject of VRAM another question here basically asking in terms of VRAM requirements it's a bit of a chicken and egg situation so do the GPU manufacturers increase the vram first and then the game start using more vrm or is it the game sort of push the manufacturers the developers of the game push them to add more very ram to the cards it's kind of like a natural progression of things that probably depends on a whole host of things like how much memory costs to add like does it make sense to do a doubling of memory so that's probably one thing but obviously the hardware has to be there for the game developers to use that much memory there's no point making a texture pack that nobody can run it more than one frame per second yeah I think you know hardware manufacturers would look at the trends and sort of see where games are going you know if they're making eight gigabyte cards and current games using seven gigabytes out of the eight gigabytes then there would be that incentive to maybe bump it up to twelve for the next generation yeah so I think yeah it's kind of both yeah pretty much yeah it's definitely both alright another question from our discord chat here the Vegas 64 I had was improved greatly by under vaulting it used less power and therefore ran cooler it sounds like under vaulting on Radeon 7 still produces good results so the problem has not been fixed anybody know that under vaulting is the valid tweaking option as they provide the under vaulting options in their general drivers so the question is why aren't the cards tuned to these lower voltages that put money into cooling solutions to do with the higher voltages and hate there must be a reason for this it's very confusing oh yeah that well there is a reason the reason is that they have evaluated what specifications the cards can run at at what voltages so they'll have a frequency range though a frequency they want to achieve in a range they want the card to run in and then what voltage is required for you know a wider matter or a good amount of the cards to work with so it just improves yields so basically if they want to make the voltage tolerance is really low like or really tight rather then the yields will be a lot worse because they'll only be but there'll be a much smaller percentage of the silicon that we'll be able to achieve that and so as an example like Vega 64 you gave I had a Vega 64 card that under volted amazingly well like as best as the best sort of result you can expect to get out of those cards and I have one that was terrible you undervolt it just ever so slightly and just started crashing so that's why Radeon seven can be under vaulted it's a form of overclocking really so you can under voltage I have no idea what the percentage is but it would be a reasonably large percentage of them would have stability issues so it's not yeah it's frustrating that I suppose some cards do undeveloped really well and look great but AMD would have to have a much tighter bidding process I suppose so they'd have to be a card that runs a lot of frequencies or something like that yeah it's the same with overclocking of people wonder you know a lot of manufacturers reach their factory overclocked cards why is the reference model just the same as in fact you've got pretty much the same reason yep you can only do so much with the silicon in terms of yield so they need to keep the taunts is nice and large yeah because people think it's an under type thing it's not like overclock yeah but it's very much the same thing you're running the card out of spec so yeah it's that simple okay mitch has a question here do you think the gtx 1660 TI and then I suppose that suppose a possibly being released 1660 and 1650 as in videos attempt at upstaging Navi I think really they just did it because they need to get more competitive at those price points and they wanted to do it with churring they obviously didn't want to keep doing it with older Pascal GPUs so that's really why they did it they start to compete with themselves so the GTX 1060 wasn't selling great so it was time to move on and obviously they do have to update those product lines because at some point AMD will come to the party with newer more efficient better products so yeah any other thoughts on that one no I think you personalize that one pretty well move on okay when it comes to frame time or VR which we don't test you beyond over yourself we can only talk about the frame time stuff then how do you guys find the GTX or the Pascal ensuring cards and then Vega and the Radeon seven owners of AMD GPUs save the gameplay seemed smoother on there HBM memory cards versus nvidia cards any personal experience or thoughts with that one well we probably can talk to that a bit because I I personally game with a Vega 56 card reason for that is I had a spare one so I don't want to be taking the GPU out of my personal system so I usually just use whatever spare no matter how low end or high and that may be in this case it was very 56 I had two of those so I'm using that and really I don't buy until it all like there's some games where the Radeon GPUs the frame time performance isn't that good there's other games where the Turing GPUs aren't very good but for the most part they're both very good in all games so yeah I think that this whole frame time thing came from way back when ami GPUs had a lot of issues with crossfire frame pacing I had issues with single cards but and there made a killer crossfire yeah and then they spent a long lot of time improving that performance so then I maybe throw time people thought that it was was better than nvidia cards but certainly as you said what i've experienced myself as well there's really no significant difference it can vary title to title but overall I think both cards yeah pretty much as smooth as one another a couple of people are complained with the Radeon 7 content saying that I use the average frame rates for showing the percentage differences between cards and for working out the cost per frame truth is if you take the average one percent low result across all the games you end up with the same figures so yeah there'll be some games where yeah the AMD GPUs might be a teeny tiny bit smoother if you're very sensitive to that and then vice versa with the GeForce GPUs this is an interesting question from science gaming our disco community what do you guys expect games to look like in five years it's often tough to tell with 100% certainty which game is 2013 to 2014 in which game is 2018 to 2019 I think back in the day everyone without hesitation could tell which game is from 1997 and which is from 2002 yeah I mean like with a lot of things there's going to be diminishing returns over a certain point you know when you get really good quality textures really good quality geometry really good coiling you know there's fewer and fewer things you can improve in a game to get better you know visual quality or differences between each generation personally I probably could tell the difference between 2013 games and 2019 like if you look back on a game from five years ago now this and they telltale signs like high quality lighting I think for the most part yes there is but there are some games that have been rehashed one or two or three times too many yeah it's asin's create or yeah I mean well even like we saw it just calls for like a lot of the effects went massively backwards yeah previous instalment so that was disappointing to say I think just me touching on this question quickly I think back then hardware computer hardware graphics cards were moving so quickly whereas now that's as we've seen since what 22 nanometer or something that the new significant gains especially from the mid-range the mainstream uses it's coming much slower so you are seeing that sort of five years of gradual very slight tweaks to the graphics yeah I mean the main question here was you know what do you guys expect games to look like in five years I think there's probably a number of categories that could be improved in games I think there's some areas that probably wouldn't be as improved as much but certainly the one that I would look at is lighting not quality because I think the quality is very good at the moment but certainly accuracy there seems to be a move towards ray tracing for example in five years time that could be quite a dominant technology yes that's one thing I look at I still think today while texture quality is I was going to say texture quality is high in some games but it's not great in others and I think as GPUs have more memory available to them on the consoles if the consoles increased from 80 to say twelve or sixteen in the next-gen will start to see for 4k gaming really high quality textures and then as well I think a big area that I'd like to see approved is sort of that not necessarily the geometry of individual items but certainly the number of items so the ability to have your scene feel really you know complete like in real life when you go into someone's house is so me I am sure I think that was a cool thing about Metro Exodus yeah there's my I haven't played a whole lot of it but the bid I play yeah that was a high density of just things objects entail so that really made the game look pretty amazing for me yeah so I think those are the sort of three things I think I'd like to see improved as well as sort of the on the CPU side we might get better AI better simulations and that sort of thing but I certainly expect those three hours I think I think things more like water quality for example still very good right now in cloth simulations we've already got techniques to simulate hair I think a lot of those things I wouldn't expect too many improvements on but the other areas I would say there's still room to grow there all right generally speaking what monitor panel type T and IPS of EI do you think provides the best balance between response time and color vibrancy so clearly your video on this topic was not enough for Daniel so this is just when I seen planets and that's fine that's fine so the best balance between response and color vibrancy that's probably going to be IPS V is the slowest in terms of response times T and the fastest so I think you know if you want the best balance you probably have to go IPs there's also a good option that said Monte ends as well they're getting some good quality you know tan panels we've I reviewed that via check Mario recently that good vibrancy so yeah I think you know if you're looking at that 4 to 5 millisecond range for response times and you want good colors then you probably have to go IPs all right next question do you consider a rise in 5 2600 a bottleneck for an RT X 2080 or any enthusiasts upscale PC builds so basically any sort of high-end graphics card where you sort of get these questions every now and then it really depends on the games you're playing so we're looking at what are we talking about there that's ten atti sort of levels of performance that's pretty punchy GPU performance most games are GPU bound so shut off the Tomb Raider for example especially if you're running it you go for K forty or forty P even I don't think it's going to be as it's definitely look at me a severe bottleneck horizon five twenty six hundred is a great gaming processor but it is very affordable so the r-tx twenty eight is inexpensive graphics card I suppose but you're using a risin seven process aren't you I'm using thread Rupa threat okay I thought you thought you were gaming on a Rison processor for a while I was yeah with a with we thought nad with a nature but I was playing at ultra wide 1440p yeah so again very GPU bound there basically the answer's no where the rise in process is going to struggle is where is areas where it would struggle with any GPU so for example for player for V for Starcraft 2 the rise in CPUs are horrible it's an old game single maybe maybe using two threads now thing it's still single thread and it just doesn't take advantage of any of the rise and instructions or anything like that so it's it runs very badly there's a couple of other old games that people have told me run badly but any new modern demanding totally like your battlefield 5 that'll run perfectly fine multiplayer and all that so no I don't think it's really something you have to concern yourself with I think for the most part we perfectly fine alright we've got a big combo question here from one of our YouTube commenters Grady on the question yes for question we're gonna have to rapid-fire these I reckon so are you really steep I'll try let's go do you think our TX and ELSS will be adopted by gamers not right now yeah I mean it's got to be adopted by game developers before gamers can adopt it yep do you think games I should be excited for rise in 3000 CP so should you be excited for the rights in 3000 yeah why the hell not yep do you think the RAM prices will go down in 2019 quarter to or quarter three I already had started to go down significantly yeah they're definitely dropping so yeah I don't think they drop much more significantly they'll probably tend to do that before ddr5 comes then they'll sort of do I'll probably pick up a little bit as production slows stops and a final one here do you think that Navi will compete with r-tx graphics cards I mean sure you will compete with one of them at least you would hope so yeah yeah hard to say though yeah okay a good question here from one of our YouTube commenters in the used market I see a lot of people selling their old Intel CPUs for a lot of money the i7 4790k is still selling about 200 euros on average while the Rison 520 600 news only 170 euros why do people think that old CPUs are worth so much well because they are like if they're selling them for that much well if they're listing them for that much and they're selling for that much they're worth that much but there's multiple reasons for why that is one of them is people buy or have an older Intel system with that platform and maybe they bought it with a core i3 or a Pentium whatever they want to upgrade and it's much cheaper for them to spend $200 or 200 euros on 4790k than it is to build a whole new rise and or you know modern Intel systems that's why they do that so that's generally why you can ask so much for those CPUs because it's just it is still cheaper for someone another reason which is going to be unpopular opinion but it is true the i7 4790k for most games particularly older games we had a question where I mentioned Starcraft earlier the Intel processor is still going to perform better than horizon 5 2600 and a lot of people use that information to bag the rise and 5 processor and say how garbage rising is because older Intel CPUs like this has well based core i7 that we're talking about is faster for gaming but from Haswell all the way up to coffee lake which the increases in IPC have been very very small the increases in frequency have also been very very small so it's not an old ancient rubbish CPU architecture from Intel Haswell still very good until as it made many steps since then it's still a quad core with eight threads so it still plays all the latest games is that a problem and like I said it's faster than most of the rise and lineup but the reason why I recommend you buy a rise in five 2600 if you're looking at if you're not if you don't have an old Intel see system and you're looking at building a new computer you like for similar money I can get a used Intel system or do I buy a risin system I highly recommend you don't bother with the use stuff all the obvious pitfalls that come with buying used hardware and the rise in five 2600 is plenty fast as we said we'll get the most out of just about every GPU you can afford it if you're looking at buying second out hardware and it has all modern platform features so there's it's got native USB 3.1 and all that kind of stuff new hardware warranty and you'll be able to upgrade to the Rison 3000 series later in the area so it's got a good upgrade path it's not a dead platform you've got room to upgrade without having to try and buy higher end processors for exorbitant exorbitant prices so or exuberant prices rather sorry about that okay that concludes part 1 of this month's QA good job picking the questions and good job asking the questions very good questions this month it was a lot of fun and I'm keen to go getting apart Steve it's your phone for the Q&A videos mate what are you doing you can go long like subscribe share follow us on patreon we're very professional now we gotta use that come on you can't you can't back out now out of that row okay uh yeah so like subscribe what else do we tell people to do they can give us money on patreon they can if you hadn't done that you would have caught our livestream we just did before this it was amazing can't talk highly enough yeah best livestream a fighter has occurred you have to wait until next month's livestream yeah you can't go back and watch them no impossible anyway thank you very much for watching thank you for supporting us and I'm your host Steve I'm your host Tim that's who this guy's been all this time it's his name never say it hey thanks for watching see you later