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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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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

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

Project Dolly: A look into cloning Windows (Planning)

I'll admit something. If there's one topic I typically stay away from because it seems like everyone has a consensus on the subject, it's cloning Windows installations from an HDD to an SSD. The consensus is it's always better to just reinstall the OS. While there are some practical reasons, the most common ones I've heard to avoid cloning is because you'll encounter a plethora of issues. I've found this puzzling considering: I've cloned multiple times with no ill effect I don't un

October 18, 2017

4

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

Let's build the PS4 Pro

EDIT: It's probably a good idea to lay out some ground rules at the top so people know how I'm approaching this: Everything must be new. The reason being the used market is not consistent or reliable. Everything must be gotten from official channels. Hardware must be matched as closely as possible. If the exact part or equivalent cannot be found, a justification must be needed. If a part on the PS4 is available for the PC, it must be included. If I'm allowed t

December 9, 2016

3

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

Think beyond computer problem solutions than just knowing them

Fixing computers is always a satisfying thing. Especially after chugging away at it for hours or even days. And when you come across the solution, you tuck it away in your memory, notebook, or what have you so the next time the problem shows up, you can fix it again. But I don't think that's enough to really "master" the computer. I'm having a feeling that a lot of people who are beyond beginners accumulate solutions to problems or at least know how to find them online and simply spo

March 11, 2018

3

Why multi-video card setups can't combine VRAM

( I need a name for blog posts like these, but all the good ones are taken ) While I don't think it's often brought up, an idea might come about that when using multiple video cards, such as in SLI or Crossfire, their VRAM combines. So if you have two 8GB cards, you effectively get the same thing as a 16GB card. However, this isn't the case. You might be asking... but why? If these setups combine GPU power, how come VRAM doesn't combine? On a broader view, the video cards

June 2, 2018

3

Is PC gaming really cheaper than console gaming?

Oh boy, I'm going to stir up the hive with this entry. I found myself in a discussion on another gaming website where the article was originally for discussing the PS4 Neo, and the comment train went on discussing the implications of if consoles do follow the hardware refresh model like cell phones and such. Or rather, if you're going to have to spend $400 on the latest and greatest thing, doesn't this drive the value of console gaming down even more? So I want to look into this topi

September 4, 2016

2

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

2

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

When something seemingly designed well still has a problem.

With yet another security bug found on processors, one has to think how anyone would've let this through for this long. People would like to think there's incompetent engineering out there and while sure, they exist, what people also don't see are the designs that even you would agree with all of the knowledge and experience in the world that seems sound without experiencing it in the real world. So I have an example of such. This one I love to share, partly because pride (I was a junior develop

May 5, 2018

2

About that Task Manager CPU utilization "being wrong" (and about idling)

Note: I posted this as a status update, but it got long enough that I wanted to preserve it as a blog. This popped up in my news feed: Netflix's senior software architect says Windows' CPU utilization meter is wrong. He has some good points in that it's not measuring the time a thread is actually doing useful work, rather than waiting on something, like data from RAM. Which he also points out that there is a gap in performance between RAM and CPU, but that's been a known problem for

May 2, 2018

2

Project Dolly: A look into cloning Windows (Preliminary Results)

A couple of days ago, I decided to examine if cloning Windows was as bad as everyone says it would be, in that you'll run in to problems and other issues. So I'm using my laptop as a test bed for this project to see if anything really happens if you clone Windows. When I started this project, I installed Windows 10 Fall Creator's Update to the laptop's SSHD, then installed programs that I would've used in a normal setting, and imported the settings of two of them (Visual Stud

October 21, 2017

1

We should really stop chastising people who think PC building is "too hard"

The other day I found a Gamer's Nexus video in my subscription feed. It was Steve Burke criticizing a magazine's article on how PC building is "hard" and to prove it wasn't, would do a speed build. Admittedly I didn't watch the whole video, nor did I read the article in question. But my overall takeaway is this: to all you people who build or built their machines, stop saying it's easy as if building a PC is like operating an elevator or using a phone. Now ignoring the ot

June 11, 2017

1

Does Making Windows 10 Lean Do Anything For Gaming Performance?

There's been some talk about Microsoft implementing a "gaming mode" for Windows which should help improve the performance of games. Or at least, minimize the impact of the OS on gaming performance. What this means is up in the air. However I decided to take a stab at something that could be like it and create a lean build of Windows 10. That is, a lot of its components were either disabled, deleted, or otherwise no longer a factor. The Setup I'm using my computer for this test,

January 14, 2017

1

List of Guides I've Written

A list of guides I posted somewhere on the site, just in case I post more than the 10 URL limit for profiles (plus that'd get wild anyway) A guide to how to identify if you have a CPU bottleneck and see how much it can affect you. An explanation on HyperThreading. It also answers the question "Why is it bad to have no page file?" Not really a guide, but might be hel

September 25, 2016

1

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

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

Why what happens in consoles, doesn't really matter in PC gaming

I forget where I read this, maybe it was on Reddit, but I recall someone saying that NVIDIA is screwed because consoles will heavily be using compute and since it's AMD hardware they're running, asynchronous compute. The belief is since the PS4 and XB1 are now more or less PCs, developers are going to use all the technologies advantageous to AMD hardware and when they port the games over, said advantages will come over. This is doubly true now that Vulkan and DirectX 12 are touted to offer "cons

July 21, 2016

1

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: 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

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

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

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

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