Gadgetory

this is going to be a juicy episode of tech top welcome back to check out cities Barranco my back to you guys today with episode 31 of tech talk and today we have quite a big episode for you guys going to be talking about API is going to be talking about upcoming gravis guards and video got slapped with a lawsuit also at the end I'll talk about why prices are so expensive internationally compared to America more pacifically I'll focus on Australia as well since I got asked to pacifically talk about that Sony let's move on into the episode here and the first big news is that AMD has stopped support for mantle so they're going to be discontinuing mantle and pretty much putting it towards then you architecture called Vulcan well it's actually not their new architecture is actually a company called Chronos that makes OpenGL and so they're going to be putting their developments in mantle into the new architecture called Vulcan or pretty much next generation OpenGL so this actually looks really promising especially since a company that has experience with a cross platform api is going to be getting behind it and they're going to be building it up from the ground up and it's going to be cross compatible so this is going to be a good API for the future so i'm really looking forward to the developments with Vulcan as I believe it's kind of like the right answer to what a mantle should have been but I mean don't be don't be sad like I know some people will be sad about mantle being discontinued I'm not sad I mean that research has spurred better things for the industry i mean DirectX 12 is looking promising as well but this definitely looks good essentially it's not going to be as as apparently it's not going to be as core or straight to the metal as mantle was but it will be a lot better than say directx 11 or another previous API since they are they realize that they've got to make these api is more efficient so we can get better performance out of our hardware so anyway that's i'm really looking forward to this api really looking forward to the developments i'm sure steam is going to be a big player in the car basically this with support towards this API but not to be outdone we've got here pretty much Direct X 12 as well so apparently some rumors have it the DirectX 12 could do away with SLI and even crossfire and basically just use the graphics cards to their full potential even taking advantage of that on board vram now I'm a little bit skeptical of this and this is certainly one of those things that I'm going to be waiting and seeing for but it would be awesome to get the most out of your hardware right especially since SLI and crossfire i currently have that limitation on the vram where they can only use the effective vram of one of the cards essentially so this is actually a good thing that I hope that I hope the rumors are true that's all i hope the room is about DirectX 12 or even Vulcan it could be Vulcan they didn't specifically mention which API it was in this article so i'll be putting all these articles in the description below for you guys you can check them out but DirectX 12 has been confirmed to be on Windows 10 only now this is a little bit oldest news but it kind of makes sense since Microsoft is going to be rolling out a free update for Windows 8.1 8 and 7 users so that's going to be a good thing as well I think the whole deal with Microsoft is they want to get everyone on Windows 10 it'll make him a lot easier to code instead of releasing different code for all different types of os's especially a good thing especially if it's going to have directx 12 and especially if these numbers are going to be what they are in these benchmarks so we can see here this is that star swarm benchmark which really has a lot of physics to process and it's pretty much one of the best examples where you see mental perform a lot better than directx 11 so what Microsoft has decided to do is get a demo on directx 12 going and you can see here the performance differences between DirectX 12 and mantle are not so big and so that's something that's really good news especially since the popularity of DirectX 11 is pretty much in every game so DirectX 12 you'd expect that to be rolling out with every single game there and this means that ultimately us is the consumer we're going to win out we're going to win with this a big win because we're going to be getting better graphics for our current hardware configurations so that's a really good thing I look forward to seeing Direct X 12 and both volk and I think they're both going to be great for the industry i think as currently your main to our you made to api so direct x 11 and DirectX 9 to some extent and also OpenGL they're kind of like three main AAP is used in pc games at the moment but let's have a look at not to be a dumb medal for Apple they've also got their own thing going on and it's arm apparently it's pretty good i mean metals looking good for iOS so Apple have decided to say hey we're going to take a page out of your book too and we're going to make our own API for our own iOS which is mainly for smartphones so you can see that Apple of sort of they're really leading the smartphone market i mean i don't have a apple smartphone personally i mean i've got an android smartphone much better value for money in my opinion but i've actually got to review this too i only recently bought this so great smartphone from a brand called huawei or something like that so a great smartphone though I mean Apple Oh doing their own thing and they're obviously really successful right there they currently like the biggest company in the world I think so Apple had definitely taken their own approach to it they've developed met medal for there are for their own iOS API so it's pretty interesting the developments that we're seeing recently and I'm pretty sure mantels a great thing in that it sort of showed all these different companies that hey this is what you can do with an API and these are the benefits that you can get out of it so that's a pretty cool feature I do wonder though what androids response or Google's response to this is going to be because if metal starts grant gaining a lot of support then obviously that's going to make the hardware on the isle the apple smartphones utilized a lot better and that's going to be giving them a huge advantage in some benchmarks making it obviously making their smartphones as seem like they're better value for money so I wonder what Google's response to this is going to be it's going to be interesting to see how Android or Google with their Android respond to this I mean I'm not too in the know with smartphones maybe some guys wanna chiming in the comments like in advance I say sorry about smartphones it's not really my field of expertise but anyway let's move on now to steam Gabe good old Gabe has decided to launch a massive sale for linux games and basically there's just a huge amount of cool titles here so if you're a linux-based OS user you can take advantage of some of these stale sales and get in here for some pretty cool games I mean civilization beyond Earth they've got that going out you know which it too so you got some cool games there that you can take advantage of and get them for really cheap on the steamos sale so apparently lately a lot of companies have launched different prototypes for their steam machines one of the prototypes that's really sort of caught my eye with zotac and they've sort of said hey we're going to go with a skylake and a mobile version of the gtx 970 and they're going to put it together in one steam box and this thing is going to use less power than a hundred watts which is actually going to be pretty impressive for the performance you're going to get out of this thing so this thing will costs probably yeah I think they're saying it started to be about a thousand dollars which actually isn't too bad I mean especially for something that's only going to use a hundred watts and will be good for a home theater PC because it won't be using much power at all anyway so it'll get good performance figures but of course you could build obviously build a better desktop variant which is what i always recommend being a desktop enthusiast myself so anyway let's move on now to some different news this is a broad well so broad well a brob okay anyway and we're going to talk typically about broadwell k because i got asked to talk about Broadwell k in a previous tech talk and basically i started talking about broad well in general one guy in the comments went ballistic is like man the mobile chips have already been released it's like and i wasn't really referring to the mobile chips yes broadwell you has already been released that's the mobile variants for laptops that's already been released we're not even bothering focusing on that because the yields worse acceptable for the mobile chips if you guys did no mobile variants of Intel's chips are clocked lower generally because they use less power and you want them to use less power in a laptop due to how small laptops are however with broadwell k essentially the desktop variants or just generally broad well as it's named here this actual article and this leak is about right actually after looking at this timeline this makes a lot of sense I mean as we can see here broad Wells looking like it's going to be released in May and then followed by Sky lake later this year I'd say probably that's a little bit too early for Sky lake s sky like you the mobile variant does look like it will get pushed in sometime and maybe june july though sky like the actual desktop variant of it i believe that'll be pushed out probably in maybe august possibly july at the best and then you've got obviously the six and eight core variants being pushed back quite a bit though one thing with Broadwell k is there's there have been this recent release of a bios version from a zoo so i actually tracked it up here and yes Zeus in an update have released support for broadwell k or Broadwell desktop chips in one of their BIOS updates now people this got sort of the rumor mill going crazy but look it's not such big news because like asrock azusa gigabyte i just pronounce it as zeus it's just old school don't don't hate me for it like I know there's some guy in the comments yeah but it's I don't really care but I've just always said it a zoo since I got into computers but anyway so anyway getting back on topic here these companies like a Zeus asrock and goodbye they all get access to the Intel CPUs in pretty much the Alpha stages and that's a long time ago so pretty much I'm pretty sure they would have got access to broadwell k last year they would have got a early sample and then they can start coding their boss for it so the fact that this bias update is released it's not such a big thing just further sort of if anything it further supports the schedule in this article that Broadwell is going to be released maybe sometime in May so we can expect to see broadwell and broadwell k released in May and then sky like the desktop variant released sometime later this year that kind of looks a little bit it makes more sense especially from a selling point to release sky lake and Broadwell at the same time just didn't make any sense at all as I pointed out one of my previous tact aux so this this does make sense anyway so let's say let's move on to some necks some other news here and that is marvel vs sandforce and it's something that I've always sort of wondered about but I recently got some solid answers for myself when I started benchmarking the bx 100 also benchmarking my old Intel 335 against the MX 100 as well and it's always it's funny this is one of those funny things that now it all makes sense now that I can process at all because when I got the Intel SSD and I've used other SSDs before that as well I've used the corsair force 3 i think i've also used an a data it also use the western digital though i can't expect a hard drive to perform as well as an SSD i think anyone can't expect that but basically the marvel controller up until this point in time is the only controller on an SSD that I've used where I'm getting really consistent results we're talking like I'm doing tech talk for you guys right now I'm recording off my desktop I'm recording the desktop and my webcam and audio both on the desktop and from the line in and that takes up a lot of data and so my temporary storage to do this is off my SSD and so my SSD has to perform consistently and if it doesn't we're going to get dropouts we're going to get sinking of audio and video it's going to go crazy and things are going to drop out and I'm gonna have to retake the whole thing again and it's funny because what ever since I got the Intel SSD I've had these audio sync video sync problems and I've had video being shorter than audio I mean than the actual desktop video footage but with Marvel in the MX 100 I've never had that happen not once and when I did this HD tune pro benchmarks in my recent be x 100 review it all made sense so what I'm going to say with sand falls vs marvel and verse other controllers for that matter on the SSDs I know there's a few other controllers out there is that the Marvel controller works it's very consistent and this is why people are big advocates for Marvel controllers on SSDs because they're so consistent of course the nand flash does make a difference and what nand flash they use on those SSDs but i also would argue that the controller matters as well and that's really important and in my experience the Marvel controller is the one to go for so obviously I don't know how the silicon motion performs yet but you know those early benchmarks kind of showed me that the MX 100 with its Marvel controller is the SSD to get for the money and that Marvel controller is the granddaddy so that's just going to for me that kind of settles the debate for me so I'd go with a marble controller if you are indeed using an SSD for a workstation that's just what I'd like to advocate if you're using it for just games and suddenly that's not going to make a difference but for actual proper workstation productivity I would go with the Marvel control on your SSD so let's move on now to some new news with the GTX 970 and that is that Nvidia have been slapped with a lawsuit for their GTX 970 and the Miss advertising of it now what is going to happen here I don't know it's up to the judge I think ultimately though you know nvidia did make a mistake and whether it was a deliberate mistake or it was non deliberate is up to the judge to decide so i don't know the outcome of this but look they advertised it as 4 gigabytes of vram and you're effectively truly only getting three point five gigabytes of vram for gaming so I mean look then I don't know I don't know what's going to happen but is the GTX 970 still a good card for the money and that's like yes it is it's still a really good card for the money but yeah I look in the last tactile guy blasted and video ready for it I just don't want to talk about it anymore you know it's funny because like I just don't get one last thing I'll add to this whole thing is I just don't get why people haven't done the right benchmark yet like someone please give me a gtx 980 and i'll do the benchmarks and i'll give you concrete answers that you need to know it's pretty simple get a gtx 980 underclock it and then compare it with when you get the performance say you're running a benchmark only utilizes two gigabytes of erm get them running at the same performance so you're overclocking the gtx 970 you're getting and running around the same performance on the GPU cores and then you throw those vram intensive benchmarks on both the 980 and the 970 and that will give you your answers that'll give you definitive answers in my opinion so I don't know why no one has ran that benchmark yet but I would like to see them run that benchmark that will give you the concrete answers you're looking for but anyway let's move on now to other news nvidia have announced the titan x and so this is their new big daddy that is essentially going to be pretty ridiculously overpriced so it's going to carry a parent it's going to carry a price tag in excess of a thousand dollars and it's going to carry 12 gigabytes of vram GD @ gddr5 vram on board and it's also going to carry over 3,000 cuticles I think 3072 cuticles there the maxwell cuticles as well so this thing is going to be a lot faster than a 980 and any previous graphics card nvidia have released now there's no denying that this thing's going to be a beast but the problem is is that the price per performance is going to be stupid it's going to be stupidly low so i'm not going to be recommending this graphics card already even before it comes out though but i will say one thing this is why Nvidia make money this is why their balance sheet you ask any account to take a look at invidious balance sheet and they will tell you it's a healthy company and this is why they're healthy company because there are people out there with huge amounts of money and they just don't care they want the best performance right now and they can get that with the tight necks AMD don't have that option at the moment so I would like to see them push the i-93 90x out as soon as possible and this is where we're going to move on now with the 390 ex apparently it's been rumored that it was in one of their computers and it does have a fourth hour 4000 stream processors so the 3 90 x is definitely looking pretty good as well though if it is indeed only have if it doesn't only have 4096 stream processors that's not a huge increase over the i9 290x so it remains to be seen as are we getting a new architecture with the r9 390 X are we getting hbm are we getting all these benefits I kind of it I'm just hearing so many conflicting reports on the internet at the moment where I don't know what AMD is going to do because we know that Nvidia are going to release an ax we know that's coming and then later on down the track we know something like the GTX 980 TI is coming and I'd say the 980 TI is probably coming in august or something like that but we don't know when's the 39 TX exactly coming when's the 380 coming I just I can't give you answers but we all know that the tight necks will probably be released later this month if not early next month so but what's AMD doing you know so that they as this report says here they've lost some market share in the discrete desktop video card market and that's because of Maxwell and they release that architecture early and it was a better architecture than their previous Kepler and we've got to get an architectural improvement from AMD and you know whether you like AMD or not they bring competition to the market and we need that competition is in and consumers it does drop the prices of the graphics card so I'm hoping AMD can get something out as soon as possible and I hope it is good because we all need it as desktop enthusiasts so one of the last topics that I'm going to talk about today is why is everything in Australia so expensive or internationally for that matter but we're going to focus mainly on Australia with this and I'm going to play devil's out get here and say that they're actually the prices in Australia aren't too bad now I know some guys going to be going crazy on the dislike button already but hear me out hear me out okay so basically in Australia we pay ten percent GST on everything now in America they don't play pay any sales tax in some parts of America so we've already got a ten percent disadvantage and now when you look at it this is a good article i'll put this article in the description below goes through some of the basics about why australia is so expensive but one of the things that i'm going to focus on is the minimum wage they say higher wages here but that's not the case we're going to go a little bit more in depth and we're going to look at the minimum wages because this is one of the more important things to look at and then we'll go over some prices as well so basically in Australia you've got a minimum wage of 16.2 to US dollars per hour that's actually pretty damn good we look at the United States we go all the way down the bottom here to the United States and we can see that their minimum wage is 7.25 dollars per hour obviously in some states it's going to be more than others but you can see there that now people doing these basic business to business services like delivering parts from the port to the stores they're on you know a little bit over minimum wage possibly minimum wage so all these costs add up for businesses and they have to throw that on the end retail price that you pay for and so when the minimum wages are a lot higher in Australia then they are in the United States we can't expect to get the prices that they can in the United States if that's making any sense also another thing is is that the prices aren't actually too bad so I've just got a random example here the r9 290 so in Australia you can currently get the r9 290 for 393 dollars if we look at them if we look at America we can concert the UK we can currently get that over there for 225 pounds so if we go to our little friend Google here so we're just quickly go into Google and we'll go on 225 pounds to aud and that's 443 australian dollars so in the inning and they're paying fifty dollars more for the same graphics card than we are so if anything other parts of the world are worse off than Australia compared to America though let's have a look at America itself okay so without rebates they're paying 282 dollars for an hour 9290 currently so let's have a look 282 USD to AED we'll have a quick look and we see it's 368 dollars so you add ten percent sales tax on to that GST you've actually got more than what we're paying in Australia so that's not too bad in the defense of Australia so Australia's prices aren't too bad we look at the worst example here this is the one that I picked out is I believe it's New Zealand yeah New Zealand to paint four hundred and eighty eight dollars for at r9 290 so if we do 488 nzd to aud we can see here that they're paying 465 australian dollars for that exact same graphics card so ultimately australia isn't too bad we're not paying too much when we compare ourselves directly to America now obviously a year ago the Australian dollar was doing a lot better against the USD but it has since come down so prices will go up naturally with that since the American dollar is the world reserve currency and that'll be for a while to come I mean the USD is what all the big banks use as their federal reserve so as a reserve currency and that ain't going to change anytime soon so yeah that's I mean look it's not too bad you know things could be worse you could be in New Zealand it's also some other points i'll quickly throw in as well as that we're a lot more demographically dispersed then americans are if anything I mean you look at prices in Japan or about the same as they are in Australia and I mean you see the Japanese are all basically stuck on this little island compared to a straight so if anything I should be complaining about prices in Japan being not as good as they are in Australia or in America since we're so demographically congested here so anyway that's about all I can say is the prices aren't too bad industry yeah you know definitely could be worse depending on where you are in the world so I hope that answers the question of why our price is so expensive in Australia there the two sort of mean things that I wanted to touch base with also that article goes over some other basics as well as to why prices are two are expensive more expensive in Australia than they otherwise are in the States so many ways that's about it for tech talk episode 31 though one thing I will talk about is some is one game in particular that I'm looking forward to and that is pillars of eternity from obsidian man this game looks good Wow like these are the guys who made boulders gate to shadows of em and it was amazing that was like my favorite RPG of all time had this great mystic storyline to it it just got me so immersed I've never been immersed in an RPG like I have with Baldur's Gate 2 and so I'm really looking forward to pillars of eternity I'm really hoping that obsidian can deliver are just another immersive experience because I haven't had a good pc gaming experience for a while actually and I really am looking forward to this game and I hope it delivers I hope you guys if you're looking for a really cool sort of RPG then you might want to check this out it's a it's essentially it combines both a real-time and a turn-based engine together to make one pretty cool game and the customization is just so good in any game from obsidian and I'm really looking forward to it so if you have any comments or questions about any of the articles in today's tech talk then please leave a comment the comment section below and I'll get back to you as soon as I can if you enjoyed this tech talk and please give it a thumbs up and I got the old mic stand back I actually got this crap one in like don't buy one of these things seriously it's like this cheap desktop arm and it's just so bad man like came off without me even touching and just like rattled off and I really tightened it down as well just an absolute piece of junk anyway eyes I'm out of here I hope you enjoyed this episode and if you have any requests as well or anything you want me to talk about in the next tech talk then be sure to drop a comment in the comment section below and I'll be I'll have a look into it for you anyway peace out for now Bay