Gadgetory

so with the release of AMD's new vega gravis cards they released a technology called HB CC or high bandwidth cache controller now this is a portion of the GPU that's dedicated to using extra memory once the already a gigabytes vram buffer has been used up in games also md claims that it does make a big performance difference when the conditions are right so today we're gonna make sure that the conditions are right I'm also going to look at minimum frame rates both in the 1% forms and also minimum fps and see if it does indeed make a difference to your gaming experience welcome back to tech yes it is Brad coming to you guys today with the look at h bcc which is a technology that was touted at the start of 2017 and now that vega has been released it is a technology that's included and you can enable this in the global Whatman software feature where will it currently use additional system memory and allocate that is vram however the problem is at the moment is 8 gigabytes on vega is actually enough for how powerful the card is and so we'll see this with some of the testing we've got up here the first test was Deus Ex mankind divided where I did max us out of 4k and I did up the anti aliasing to the point where we were maxing out the 8 gigabytes of vram buffer on board now the problem here was the performance was abysmal when we went to these levels so in other words the rest of the hardware besides the a gigabytes of vram was not able to be utilized properly and this led to a very low performance figure of around 5 average FPS and now the minimums did go to around 4.3 fps however the one-percent lows were a little bit lower than that at around 3.8 fps so it was very hard to sort of get any usable experience out of this however we decided to then turn on HBC C and now there's two different settings well there's actually a lot of different settings but you can set how much of your system memory you want dedicated to the HPCC controller in this case we decided to test the both 11.6 gigabytes and also the maximum of 32 gigabytes since I had 32 gigabytes of system memory installed and when we did both scenarios it actually scored worse than the original figures that we were getting what we saw here was the max frame buffer was now going over 8 gigabytes however the performance was even worse with an average of 5.9 FPS so the average was very and slightly higher however the minimums on the first time around went down to 2.2 with a 1% low of 1.9 and then we had the second time around again average of 5.9 FPS with a minimum of 1.1 and 1% low of 1 FPS so the numbers really were nothing groundbreaking this technology was simply not doing any work in this game whatsoever when it came to actually bettering the experience because the experience was already so bad to begin with however after I did this I decided to test some different games and first up we had Far Cry primal and across the results it was really much spread out the same this technology on at low or then on a high or then even off it didn't make a difference to your average or even 1% lows Tom Clancy's the division was a very similar scenario and moving on to an old favorite crisis which is a very intensive game 1440p when we had playable frame rates nothing was changing and of course the last game that I decided to test was battlefield one so across all these different games I couldn't find any differences really in the 1% lows and also the average FPS so HPCC as it stands for gaming doesn't really do much on the vague or architecture however with all that said one area where I feel HB CC could make a huge difference is on the lower end cards for instance we recently tested the HD 69 50 which is a non grata scope but it only comes with one gigabyte a frame buffer available now when we tested that in pub gee that's player's unknowns battlegrounds we saw that that frame buffer really was limiting the graphics card to the point where you were getting a very undesirable unplayable experience and so something like this if it could allocate an extra one gigabyte or two gigabytes of system memory to the actual game itself I believe you could get a smooth playable experience at least at 720p low so I believe technology like this is very useful I just feel like in the gaming sense it's not useful on a card that already has a gigabytes of frame buffer available especially when the games nowadays are optimized for a certain level of vram and so a gigabytes is more than enough especially at 1440p if we go up to 4k maybe that's when the card like the Vega 56 is a key but it's a frame buffer becomes more useful however that being said you still have to have the other specs available on the graphics card if you don't have enough stream processors or you don't have enough RAW processing power itself you will again have an undesirable unplayable experience as we saw in the case of Deus Ex mankind divided when we started upping all those settings the frame buffer was being stressed we were getting like 5 FPS so it just wasn't practical at all and although we couldn't find a proper using gaming and in fact it was looking like it was actually a detriment to performance I believe in the professional workflow you may have uses for this I have heard of AMD having the ability to add in an SSD and using that as a dedicated vram buffer which could spell really good for certain applications that could utilize that extra frame buffer anyway guys I hope you enjoyed today's video if you did then be sure to hit that like button and let me know in the comment section below what you think of HB CC if you have any extra tests you'd like me to do to really stress this technology and see if it makes a difference for the average gamer but what I could find here today really wasn't anything compelling and in fact I thought that this technology could be really useful with older school graphics cards where the games are optimized for say 2 gigabytes of frame buffer but you only have one gigabyte available on the card itself anyway I'll catch you in another tech video very soon peace out for now bye