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Yurizaki's Tech Ramblings

A blog by Mira Yurizaki in General

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About this blog

A random blog about technology related things. Updated whenever I have something on my mind.

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The actual reason why communication standards measure in bits per second, probably

When you look at the bandwidth of a communication bus or interface such as USB, SATA, or the speed your ISP advertises they give you, you notice that often times they measure everything in bits per second instead of bytes per second, a figure we're more used to. The common reason we think that companies advertise the bits per second is because it's a larger number. And obviously larger means better to the average consumer. Confusingly as well, the shorthand versions for bandwidth looks similar e

January 30, 2020

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Pet peeves of a software developer

As a software developer, I've come across things people say that annoy me, because often it's not the reality: Software development is "easy" Like any other skill, the easy part isn't because it's actually easy, it's because people built-up experience and skills necessary to simply just do something. Because if it was easy, you, as a layperson, should be able to do it just as easily. Software is built from start to finish in one go, e.g.: "Day one patches are dumb" In sof

January 14, 2020

1

Think of Task Manager like a report to the department head

A common complaint or concern I hear with Task Manager is that what it reports doesn't seem very useful or that they wish what it'd report was something more meaningful. A commonly cited one is CPU % Utilization, which people have commented that it doesn't really represent what the CPU is actually doing. After stewing on this I thought of a way to think about what Task Manager is better thought of: a status report to a company's department head. For example, let's take a company's he

November 21, 2019

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Demystifying Ray Tracing Further

With NVIDIA's RTX cards out and the company pushing ray tracing, I figured I have a look around at what I could in the graphics community through blog posts and whatnot about ray tracing itself. Then interacting with the community it seems like there are some misunderstandings and perhaps a warped interpretation of what's going on. So this post is a random assortment of thoughts regarding the encounters of others discussing this topic and what my input is. Ray tracing describes a typ

November 12, 2019

1

Discussing Myths: You can't boot Windows that was installed for another computer

This is a statement I see prevalent in tech circles: Whatever computer you install Windows on can't be booted on another computer. The most common cited reason is the drivers that were installed on that particular Windows will conflict and cause issues with the hardware in another computer. This is false. If only because I've not only successfully booted into Windows installed for another machine, but managed to do work in it. I used this method to fix someone else's computer and even when the d

November 12, 2019

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Explaining "Asynchronous Compute"

One of the more touted features of applications using DirectX 12 and Vulkan is "asynchronous compute." Over the years it's seemed to gain some mystique with people saying one thing or another creating a sort of stir of information. In this blog we'll go over what asynchronous compute is, where it came about from, and how NVIDIA and AMD handle it. What exactly is asynchronous compute? Instead of trying to find an answer from the interwebs as this term didn't really exist much bef

November 12, 2019

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Discussing Myths: GeForce RTX. The Whole Thing

On this entry, GeForce RTX! And not just one thing but the whole thing. Or at least as much as possibly can remember. As with the Discussing Myth series, it's more about taking assertions or claims that people have said and poking at it, presenting an argument against the assertion or claim. RTX is only about ray tracing Perhaps the "RT" in "RTX" makes it confusing, but RTX is a technology feature set that encompasses what Turing can do. In addition to hardware accelerated ray t

August 28, 2019

1

Discussing Myths: Task Manager is Broken

This is one I often see and often question about what's really going on: the idea that Task Manager is halfway broken and what it reports is inaccurate and shouldn't be trusted. Instead, trust some other program! The reason why this assertion puzzles me is that it's a system tool that Microsoft readily makes available. I'm pretty certain as well that companies, especially major hardware manufacturers, makes sure that Task Manager in Windows reports at least something resembling what they're desi

August 9, 2019

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Discussing Myths: The Intro Post

Since I seem to talk about assertions that people seem to throw around left and right, I thought I'd start (yet) another blog series, Discussing Myths, where I take an assertion and explain why it's a myth. Or at the very least, spreading more light on it so people know what's going on beyond the surface. So for an introduction post, I figure a shotgun approach to various assertions with shorter responses are in order. If you have more you want me to look at, feel free to drop a repl

July 31, 2019

0

Yet another AMA

I've been stewing on this for a while (and I kind of didn't want to stomp on @Arika S's) but I figured... why not go for it? So here's the AMA if you want to ask me a question, any question! Yes you can ask anything and I will answer. But just so you're aware of the "rules" about this: The answer that I give may not be the answer you want. Until it gets added to this post, I'll accept the question. But once the question is added to this post, I will ignore future repeats of that que

July 8, 2019

1

How does the CPU/GPU bottleneck work?

The title might be a little strange to anyone who's remotely familiar with performance bottlenecks. But rather than try to explain things on a higher level, where all of the CPU and GPU usage comparisons are done, this explains on a lower level. That is, not only the what is going on, but why it happens. How Do Performance Bottlenecks work? To understand how performance bottlenecks, particularly for games, it's important to understand the general flow of games from a programming standp

May 27, 2019

1

Process for gathering video card data when analyzing application behavior, pt. 2

There was one bit I should add from this last blog: Once you've gathered up the data, how do you use it? The biggest trouble with PerfMon in the way it gathers GPU data is, while it can do per-process data gathering, it doesn't actually capture the process you're interested in unless it's already running. While that's fine and all for observing it without logging, creating a Data Collector Set that captures the process is impossible. PerfMon uses Process IDs, or PIDs, and the game's PID wi

April 28, 2019

0

The Software Enigma Machine Bonus: Refactoring some code

A bonus update to the Software Enigma Machine I did way back when. This time, I went back and refactored some code because I felt it needed it. The Outline Part 1 What is the Enigma Machine? Why did I choose to implement the Enigma machine? Before Programming Begins: Understanding the theory of the Enigma Machine Finding a programming environment Part 2 Programming the features

April 25, 2019

0

Process for gathering video card data when analyzing application behavior

Since I've been doing some tests lately involving how applications use the video card, I thought I'd write down the process of gathering this data and presenting it. After all, any sufficiently "scientific" test should be repeatable by others, and being repeatable means knowing what to do! What data am I gathering? CPU Utilization This is to see how the CPU is being used by the application. The higher the usage overall, the more likely it is to bottleneck the GPU. I may omit

April 12, 2019

1

Why OSes report processor utilization as idle process time

This was brought up in a conversation about how Windows reports processor utilization, whether it's the CPU or GPU. You may be tempted to think that processor utilization is or should be the percentage of how much the processor is being used over time rather than something like idle time, which is defined as the CPU running the OS's idle task. In a previous blog post, I did touch upon this, but I don't think the reasoning I put painted the entire picture. Basically I said: O

March 12, 2019

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[RQB] VRAM usage may not be what you think it is

Note: This is a copypasta of a reply I did to a topic. I think the VRAM thing is more complicated than "[Game] uses X amount of VRAM, therefore, you need more than X amount of VRAM these days" for performance. I've been reading on the interwebs from people that games will request more VRAM than they actually need and they may never use it, much like how apps may overshoot how much memory they need (yes this is actually a thing: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20091002-00

March 3, 2019

0

The Chiplet "Problem" with GPUs

UPDATE: I've edited this blog too many times because I always think I'm done, but then another idea comes up. *sigh* But I should be done now. With AMD's semi-recent announcement of their server processors using the so-called "Chiplet" design, I thought it'd be a good idea to talk about how this could affect other processor types. People have pointed to GPUs being the next logical step, but I've been hesitant to jump on that and this blog is to discuss why. An Explanation

January 18, 2019

5

Second followup to the airflow mod

I had two burning questions in my head: What happens if the fan is pointing down? Are the intake fans creating much of a difference? The new configs are: Intake at 30% with the other fans at a custom fan curve Fan pointing down, not running CAM Fan pointing down, running with CAM at 50% fans So here's all the data compiled. Regarding the charts, instead of using maximum clock speed (which all of them were within 1% of each other), I used maximum tempera

January 6, 2019

3

Follow-up to the Airflow Mod

This is a follow-up to my blog on the airflow mod I made. It was brought to my attention that the sound card might play a role in affecting how well my video card remains cool. My presumption is that it's not doing much to affect the cooling potential because the issue was moving hot air away from the video card area and that while the video card is sucking air from the rear, there was enough airflow that it wouldn't make much of a difference. So today I decided to test whether or no

December 30, 2018

2

Simple mod to increase video card airflow in my build

Update time to my experiments with improving GPU temperatures and case airflow. So as a recap: I've noticed that my video card was hitting thermal limits on workloads that normally didn't in the last case it was in, a Silverstone FTZ-02 After looking at the case and thinking of the airflow pattern, I came up to this conclusion: The idea was that the case fans on the top and rear would draw the hot air (marked red) up and out. But there wasn't much airflow going there. So I stu

December 29, 2018

4

Clever anti-piracy schemes

Many companies like to protect the sales of their software by incorporating anti-piracy schemes. A lot of them fall flat, being annoying and inconvenient to use to outright dangerous and perhaps legally dubious. However, there were a few that I thought were pretty clever in that not only was it transparent to people who purchased the game legitimately, but served as frustration to pirates at the same time. Sony's "Wobble" Detection Mechanism On the PlayStation 1 Most of this is

December 13, 2018

0

[RQB] How the USB Type-C retention system works

Note: This is a copypasta of a status update I did. One of the things that has eluded me about USB Type C was its retention system. On Micro B it's easy to see; those little bumps on the top of the cable's connector are it (they go into divots in the device's end). But in Type C I couldn't see anything. So I chalked it up to either friction or those six metal bits on the end of the cable's connector. It turns out it doesn't look like either. I found an exploded diagram of

December 11, 2018

0

Why are physics engines tied to frame rates?

I came across the news about Fallout 76 has a problem: you can edit a value in one of the ini files which affects the frame rate, and then the physics engine is tied to that, with the end result is players are able to move faster simply by rendering more frames. Obviously this is a problem but why do developers design the physics engines around a frame rate? You need to have a rate of change. Frame rate is a convenient source of what the rate is. A lot of equations in physics are ove

November 1, 2018

6

My general software development axioms

An assortment of random axioms that I try to think about when doing software development work. The reason why I hold to these usually falls into one of these reasons: Making the most efficient use of my time Minimal need to maintain the code (hopefully, maybe) Ease of maintaining the code Ease of reading and understanding what the code does Finding the best way to make efficient software, without tramping on the above Regarding the software development proc

October 26, 2018

0

[Random quick blog] What does Installing/Uninstalling a application really mean?

When you install an application using some install process, you'd think a lot is going on in the background aside from copying files to the install location. But for the most part, that's all it's really doing. Depending on how the application was designed and programmed, it'll be looking for files or libraries in certain places. So if said files or libraries don't already exist, the installer is making sure they get put in the right place. The only other thing that happens is to write some entr

June 9, 2018

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