The Still New What Did You Last Do Thread

[Enjay]

Source: GooberMan does in fact know what he is talking about.

21:57 - Guy: Any time someone says this:

I'm going to quote myself now, and point out that I'm a AAA game programmer and actually know what I'm talking about.

You're know they're 100% full of shit.

Unless of course, Guy, they're not full of shit and are actually telling the truth. To the best of my knowledge, that's what GooberMan is doing. Having known him and seen him post for years, I have no reason whatsoever to doubt what he said and plenty of reasons to believe him.

[Kostov]

I agree Guy's really blunt, but regardless of right and wrong he's helped me get some understanding on alot of hardware. Thanks to him and all of this I don't think I've played a video game since I got back from visiting a friend in another town.

I think all of you are helping though, and it's just my personal love of heated discussions that prompt me to forward all of these messages here at my own will. If anyone thinks I should stop, speak up, but regardless of the hostility I'm learning more and more.

I don't care if I'm not getting that 4GB VRAM card - it doesn't hurt to know about other technology.

22:15 - Guy: oh
22:15 - Guy: Tomb Raider
22:15 - Guy: I need to add that
22:16 - Guy: it also runs on 2GB GTX 660, 3GB of DDR2 RAM, and Core 2 Quad at maxuimum on solid 1080p 60fps.
22:16 - Guy: That game has to be the most well optimized game of all time.
22:16 - Guy: And it scales in SLI like a champion.
22:18 - Guy: > what games he can play right now

lel
22:19 - Guy: If they honestly make well ported games or only on PC games that actually use 4GB of RAM and *don't* look like garbage coughevilwithincough
22:20 - Guy: And if he really does "know what he's talking about" I don't want to see him porting any of the games I play.
22:20 - Guy: Using The Evil WIthin as an example...smh
22:20 - Guy: I need to be doing papers
22:20 - Guy: and insstead
22:21 - Guy: this...
22:21 - Guy: this...
22:21 - Guy: peasantry basically
22:21 - Guy: If he's a learning developer, that's one thing. But I hope he's not atctually developing AAA games where shitty textures like that can use 4GB of VRAM.
22:22 - Guy: Now don't get me wrong
22:22 - Guy: I'm sure many years down the road (3+) we'll be looking at high quality games needing more VRAM
22:22 - Guy: but by then, you'll have money to get a top-tier GPU anyway
22:22 - Guy: So an upgrade to a 4GB is pointless when you can satisfy your budget with 2GB and get top noth performance NOW and for at least another couple of years.
22:23 - Guy: I mean
22:23 - Guy: shit
22:23 - Guy: There are people in /r/pcmasterrace who still fuckin' run 8 year old GPUs on the latest titles
22:23 - Guy: so you know
22:23 - Guy: that's a thing
22:24 - Guy: Also, he called destop GPUs slow.
22:24 - Guy: He's more than full of shit.
22:25 - Guy: GDDR5 RAM is so much fucking faster than DDR3 RAM. THere's a reason we use GDDR5 ram on GPUs which he seems mildly aware of but then calls desktop GPUs slow...
22:25 - Guy: Then again it look like it might just be poor phrasing on his port
22:25 - Guy: Difficult to tell.

[GooberMan]

Yeah, probably best to stop pasting it. It's easy to be skeptical on the internet, and he's certainly taking the easy road.

Like I said though. Feel free to search through my post history. My real name isn't unknown (it's in the TXT file with all my Doom map releases) and from there you can easily search for my development history on Google.

EDIT:

22:24 - Guy: Also, he called destop GPUs slow.

No, I described the interface between the GPU and system memory as slow.

[Ctrl+Alt+Destroy]

I don't care if I'm not getting that 4GB VRAM card

You might care later. The future isn't looking too bright for 2GB cards. Just a heads up.
http://www.overclock.net/t/1515461/ipon ... a-textures
http://www.videogamer.com/pc/assassins_ ... rsion.html
http://gearnuke.com/watch-dogs-pc-full- ... -textures/
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014- ... -within-pc

[GooberMan]

^ This. GPU RAM usage is increasing. This is a trend observable even without industry-insider knowledge. And not only that, the game you're running isn't the only thing on your system consuming GPU resources. All the power in the world won't matter if your GPU can't be fed data fast enough.

[Kostov]

Not to provoke more heat, but here's more from his end.

22:32 - Guy: Assassins Creed: Ubisoft is a confirmed junk company that has put no work into proper PC ports. Proof, the next linked article. Watch Dogs. Where a player had to CREATE A MOD TO UNLOCK THE GOOD SETTINGS and the game still ran like balls even on the highest end hardware.
22:32 - Guy: As for Shadow of Mordor, that's if you want the best of the best, of the best, but you're looking at a GTX 980 ($550) at that point.
22:35 - Guy: 1GB is not enough. 2GB is fine. Really a 3GB card wouldn't kill you, but the step up in price isn't worth it unless it fits your budget.
22:35 - Guy: 2GB GTX 770 > 4GB GTX 760
22:36 - Guy: http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id- ... 0-4gb.html
22:36 - Guy: You're at 1080p, not 4K.
22:39 - Guy: Also: http://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/commen ... _gtx_760s/
22:40 - Guy: The performance review linked: http://www.legitreviews.com/gigabyte-ge ... b_129062/3
22:43 - Guy: I'm not angry or hostile towards him in any fashion mind you, I just hate ignorance mroe than anything.22:52 - Guy: Also, finalt hing on this.
22:52 - Guy: >The best thing anyone can do right now for their GPU upgrades is to favour more RAM over more power.
22:52 - Guy: THis is the OPPOSITE of what you should do.
22:52 - Guy: If you're card is too weak to drive the things that would use more RAM...
22:52 - Guy: your whole point becomes moot
22:53 - Guy: more VRAM*
22:53 - Guy: That seems to be common knowledge for basically everyone across every forum I've ever been to ecept this one.
22:58 - Guy: This is in Russian or some shit, but you can see that even a 4GB 770 is hardly fast enough to utilize the 4GB even at higher resolutions.
22:59 - Guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_fBCvFXi0g
22:59 - Guy: and these are results from synthetic benchmarks
22:59 - Guy: which hit the cards as hard as possible
23:00 - Guy: so we're outside of gaming now
23:00 - Guy: this is much more brutal to your GPU than any video game

I'm only continuing because of the info from both of you guys.

[Marisa the Magician]

heh... and I still have a GPU with 1GB of VRAM.

Edit: If you have problems with modded Skyrim, just get a supercomputer. Not only the game itself is unoptimized, it also has TERRIBLY done mod support, and mods themselves just slow things down even more. And let's not get started on ENB... oh boy, ENB. Its slowness is in Boris' own words "intentional and not a bug". Damn thing seems to be designed in the same way as Skype to protect against reverse engineering.

[Kostov]

So do I. The 550 Ti is good for early-decade titles, but I have to upgrade soon.

[Gez]

I've never understood why so many people use ENB.

[GooberMan]

*sigh* I'd really rather nothing else was pasted either way. He doesn't understand the hardware, and his only benchmarks are what he runs now with no view of the future.

Let's see if I can keep this understandable.

On my work computer, doing not much in Windows, my GPU uses 250MB. That's already over 10% of a theoretical 2GB card's memory accounted for before you even load a game.

Then you load a game. At the bare minimum, you need aback buffer and swap chain. Rendering techniques these days means that those resource costs are just the colour buffers. And at least two of them. That's not much, less than 20MB.

Pretty much every major engine these days does deferred-rendering though, which means it's very definitely not just rendering to one buffer. There are a number of separate buffers being rendered to - depth, normal, diffuse, lighting, etc. not to mention any other effects buffers that are used by whoever. And depending on the antialiasing method used, the memory usage can scale up according to the AA multiplier. At a minimum, it's not unreasonable to expect about 200MB to be used up by all the render buffers. Combined with the system usage, that's already filled up about a quarter of the card.

There's a number of reasons why desktop GPUs pile on separate and different RAM than the system memory. For the sake of this overview, we're sticking to the bottlenecks. Specifically, the connection between the GPU and the system. As I explained by analogy, there's a slow bottleneck to get from the system memory to the nice, fast GPU ecosystem. Once a resource is in the GPU's memory banks, all is well. But it takes time to get there. And - here's the kicker - if you use more resources than your GPU can hold, it can disappear from the memory banks and need re-uploading the next time it is used.

Current games don't use too much, and that's mostly because they've been authored for consoles first. The PS3 had 256MB of dedicated GPU memory, while the X360 could use all 512MB as GPU memory. Both the PS4 and the Xbox One operate like the X360 in that sense, and titles are limited to 5GB memory in total.

Here's what's going to happen with games coming out in the next year or two.

There will be no generation gap to straddle. Games will no longer need to target 256/512MB systems. Console games will continue using higher and higher resolution resources. ARMA 3 uses 1.2GB of VRAM right now? If it was being released next year, you could multiply that usage by 3 for the highest settings. Texture resources might double in dimensions, but it's basic math - doubling the dimensions equals a four times increase in area. Mip mapping though means that realistically it only uses about 3 times as much memory for a texture's increase in resolution. Models will go up in quality as well.

Now. Let's assume that theoretical higher-resolution ARMA3 was running on your 2GB video card. The Windows Vista and later graphic driver model virtualises GPU memory. If you were to try running the higher-res version on XP for example, if the developer wasn't doing error checking properly then your game would simply crash on load. That doesn't happen on Vista+. Rather, Windows manages what is on the GPU for you. Your 2GB card still runs the game. But since it can't use all 3+GB of resources at once, Windows cycles the resources in and out as needed. What will happen is that your GPU will stall while it waits for new data. And yes, it will have to wait for it. It has to go from the system memory cache through a narrow pipe to get to the GPU's nice fast memory - and then will probably be dumped again in very short order to make room for the next thing that needs to be rendered.

This is the problem with PC architecture, and the main thing that master race evangelists overlook when talking about how powerful their rigs are. The PC can do anything and has more raw power than the consoles. This is not a question for debate. The. GPU you want to buy I believe has more power than the consoles. But the PC is a general purpose system. Consoles are architected for a very specific purpose and get some very good performance benefits - for example, not having to transfer resources back and forward from system memory because the GPU already has direct access. (It also has other nice things like hardware audio decompression, which the PC pretty much lacks in any useful form).

I cannot in good faith recommend anyone wanting to play next year's games with console-quality graphics resources buy a 2GB card. Your experience will suffer with frame rate spikes unless you turn the texture quality down. 3GB should get you by, but 4GB will be quite comfortable. Until they ship PC games with higher quality assets that the console version for example - see the stupendous pack for Shadows of Mordor that was released for an example.

[leileilol]

I never liked the 'injected postprocessing better grafik dx11' culture and the entitlement and specswhoring that comes with it. Not a wise idea to get new hardware based on unoptimized hobbyist curiosities.

The closest i've brushed across was with eFX+SweetFX but that's only for having a platform to develop a 3dfx shader in, and that shader no way is an improver. I just wanted to recreate that "better clear superior 3dFx VooDoo gaming" fanboy placebo effect in a shader for my Radeon.

I still use 1GB VRAM, any more is just hype for lazy asset control. A 4k eye texture Unity game would most likely require that much before any real optimized games do. Also consider the common bullshit practices of marketing by the numbers. Having more VRAM is not going to help pixel read throughput that those postprocessing layers of pretention require.

[wildweasel]

So far, I have only had two games have problems with my 1 GB of VRAM: Bioshock Infinite and Warframe. In both cases, neither game complained about a lack of memory, and the only evidence that anything was wrong was when both games would randomly hang for 5-10 seconds when moving between areas. Nowadays, I monitor the VRAM usage very closely. Bioshock only became playable when I turned screen resolution down to 1280x720 instead of 1920x1080, and lowered texture details to Low. Warframe still hitches up from time to time, and I'm unsure what I can do about it without running it in a window the size of a postage stamp.

[Kostov]

A friend of mine running a laptop said that newer Warframe updates slowed down the game for him. I have 1 GB of VRAM, haven't played it in a while, and backing a few months can recall the game running very smoothly. Can't be arsed to update it now.

Did Warframe run better for you earlier this year?

[GooberMan]

So far, I have only had two games have problems with my 1 GB of VRAM: Bioshock Infinite and Warframe. In both cases, neither game complained about a lack of memory, and the only evidence that anything was wrong was when both games would randomly hang for 5-10 seconds when moving between areas. Nowadays, I monitor the VRAM usage very closely. Bioshock only became playable when I turned screen resolution down to 1280x720 instead of 1920x1080, and lowered texture details to Low. Warframe still hitches up from time to time, and I'm unsure what I can do about it without running it in a window the size of a postage stamp.

Yeah, like I was saying about virtualisation, they won't complain about a lack of memory because there technically isn't one. It's like when windows uses your hard drive to virtualise system memory - it'll get slow, but it won't crash due to an out of memory error because windows is still saying there's memory available.

[leileilol]

When a game updates and it's slow, I blame it writing the updated files in fragmented drive sectors than "OH NO MY PAIR OF $1000 NVIDYA CARD'S IS OUT OF DATE TIME TO UPGRADE #PCMASTERRACE CONSOLE PASANT'S CANT DO THIS!!! *HOP'S INTO HONDA CIVIC WITH ADDED SPOILER'S*"


TF2 ran slow as shit for me until I defragged it after patching. It probably helps that I use a 11khz sound pack