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LooneyJuice

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Everything posted by LooneyJuice

  1. Yeah, it goes back to intimate knowledge of your applications. I could play plenty of my stuff on my old 7850s. Can I? Yes. Would I now? Hell no
  2. Short answer. Because they can. Other than that, if you have no incentive to upgrade, economical or otherwise, you can get away with some pretty old hardware if you have intimate knowledge of your resource usage for the software you use. Then there's stuff like performance envelopes you wish to abide by (1080p/60hz/144hz etc). I have to stress though, that an R9 290 when brand new was a pretty damn good performer. So, for most games, you fell into the bracket of buying good now, and upgrading later. If you had something like an R9 270 or something, I believe you'd be singing a somewhat different tune. Sure, it can do the same things, but the difference is how it does it. There is also the matter of ease of use. Heftier performance generally nets you a more streamlined user experience without the need to tinker with your software or games to even things out. You just crank options up, max any presets, jump in and forget about it.
  3. You just need the first line to be perfectly honest. You always need resolution and framerate. At the end of the day, isn't that all you're chasing when you're making these comparisons? If you're on a 60hz panel and you're drawing 300 frames, even if you're "bottlenecking" your GPU f.ex, you're still gaining no appreciable benefit. You could easily just cap the framerate to something high enough where the monitor scanning won't expose most of the tearing, benefit from the reduced input latency and call it a day. For most instances when it comes to 60-75hz and depending on the title (let's say AAA FPS games), you'd be surprised how low you can go and satisfy the 60hz criteria when it comes to CPUs. 144hz+ is really the only range where you should be more careful regarding CPU IPC and such.
  4. Seriously, I'll just stick it in the sig at this point. A bottleneck is a metaphor for something impeding a certain flow rate. In the PC world, that flow rate or Point of Reference is your resolution and your intended gaming frame rate (1080p/1440p/2160p 60hz/75hz/144hz+). If X CPU and X GPU combo can satisfy your resolution and framerate criteria, you're golden. But you have to set a frame or reference and specify your software suite. Otherwise, the word means nothing at all. And this website means nothing at all. It doesn't even list resolution or framerate you wish to run at. Hypothetical scenario: Would you recommend someone with a 4790k a 1080 instead of a 1080ti when he may be "bottlenecked" by his CPU at 300 fps in a certain title? If so, then you're suggesting that someone with a budget for a 1080ti settle for something lesser "because reasons" even though he can satisfy his resolution/framerate criteria and crank the eyecandy up (and use the card for longer). Everything will reach a limit, and everything is always hindered by something, the point is to specify your target framerate and resolution. All this completely arbitrary talk about bottlenecking is hurting consumers and perpetuating this weird mythos and "intuition" regarding what CPU will bottleneck what GPU and vice versa.
  5. Would be nice to know what the actual vendor/version it is. GB R9 390 G1? MSI R9 390? Sapphire Nitro?
  6. Such a cool post, thanks OP. I love neatly laid out projects like these and the retrospectives and such they prompt. I only caught the tail-end of this stuff when I was a kid, but to me it's like shorter span archaeology almost (This is not me trying to call anyone old, I swear ). Kudos!
  7. Oh not Vulkan again... Poor Doom has turned into another Ashes of the Benchmark for AMD. Even though it is an actual game, and an exceptional one at that. Not to mention, I'm not a fan of Blind Tests at all. IMO, it removes all the objectivity of painstakingly produced numbers from outlets such as GN and boils it down to a few soundbites. I could probably tailor certain games to run equally well between a 1070 and a 970 with no glaringly noticeable detriment to visuals at 1080p and have people praise one or the other. Also, seriously, if it's still dodgy to base your purchase on DX12 implementation, how prudent is it to base it off Vulkan?
  8. *cough* Clear formatting for Night Theme *cough* *cough* please *cough*
  9. It is true, sadly, which is why absolutely everyone and their dog is doing it. I really can't fault them if the content is still up to snuff. Hell, if you have no choice, might as well go apeshit and have some fun with it too while you're at it. The kind of fun Luke had when he was puking a punch of CPUs no one knew how he stashed.
  10. I have to say, for everyone commenting so passionately on this subject, on a supposed hot topic, this thread, in roughly a day has amassed a grand total of 56 posts. Including this one. How many views does an LTT video amass in 20 hours? How many likes/dislikes? How many viewers who may genuinely appreciate the content? Would you invalidate their input according to some sort of criteria? Youtube is progressively making it harder and harder to live off of, even resorting to baked-in ad spamming. Some channels have even noticed a declining trend in visits to old videos. Not to mention all the stuff I and many other people don't know about regarding what's going on under the hood. And I can't find a reason to believe the video on this kerfuffle wasn't genuine. It was backed by numbers, demographic stats, you name it. Constructive input is always nice, but vehemently expressing an opinion on this subject expecting a few tens of posts to change the course of an entire media entity is a bit, ambitious methinks.
  11. I'd suggest trying other games to determine whether or not this is a Doom-specific issue if you haven't already. Because 20 fps specifically sounds like some weird frame capping, especially regarding the menu which isn't resource demanding at all. If you wish to do so, you could completely delete your NV or iGPU drivers using DDU and reinstalling. But, if it's just specific to Doom, it may hint at something else, and may be worth reporting.
  12. That's kinda funny. Does it run as well in Fullscreen? Bear in mind Vulkan was pretty finicky when it came to dedicated fullscreen, so your mileage may vary between OpenGL and Vulkan.
  13. I'll echo the "YES" comments when it comes to snake oil. There are very few somewhat "legit" applications, but they work similar to how W10 game mode does. Meaning that, if you're one of those users who can't keep a cap on background processes, and keeps piling on bloatware, or isn't informed enough to discern what's useful and what's not, they may provide a benefit by shutting down processes that shouldn't have been running in the first place. For everyone else who can maintain a half-decent optimally running OS, they're absolutely useless. In fact, they can be somewhat detrimental to performance (As lots of reviewers found out with W10 Game Mode) as these applications are sometimes scanning for processes to shut down in regular intervals (like your AV software). TL;DR: W10 Game mode and a few of these applications may do something for people with terribly bloated OS installs, but for everyone else, it's just another background application to run. And yes, most of them are the snakiest of snake oil.
  14. That is a strange one. The menus have no reason to be capped at 20fps. The only other thing I can think of is maybe a framerate cap you stuck on by mistake with something like MSI Afterburner (More specifically Riva Tuner Statistics Server that comes with it). Additionally, make sure you're running dedicated fullscreen. The latter shouldn't make or break your framerate, but gotta start somewhere.
  15. Forgive my ignorance, but where exactly were those specs listed?
  16. A 980 with a decent overclock on it can be quite a bit faster than a 1060 at times, seeing as its marginally faster than a 1060 already. And since there are some pretty hard caps on what you can do with it unless you mod the card's BIOS, you can't really damage it. It'll crash sooner than it'll let you cause any real damage. So, assuming the card is in good condition, I'd say go for it. And regarding the card being overclocked by its previous user, if he's overclocked it, I'd even go as far as asking him what his daily use Core and Memory overclock was. A good overclocker of a card can usually sweeten the deal some more. EDIT: All bets are off though if you're terribly worried about warranty. Although having said that (someone who knows better is welcome to correct me), I believe EVGA allows warranty transfers. So depending on when he bought the card, and whether or not you can transfer the warranty, it may still have a year or more on it.
  17. The core OC is pretty nice, was it on 1.250v? The memory on the other hand is essentially what I can run at as well ~1950ish. Also on Samsung? Other than that, kinda unfortunate that these are power limited the way they are, but I can see why they did it. I had a pretty uncomfortable incident yesterday afternoon. I had some pretty high ambient (must've been 30+), and was running a fairly demanding racing title with some buddies, the top card hit 89C at max fan speed (1460 core / 1950 mem) and even the bottom card was running 81-82. Mind you, this was with 2 high airflow fans blowing directly onto the cards mounted on the drive cages of my Enthoo Pro ATX. The cooling solution really gimped these cards, and I think dictated the power limit. Doesn't help that they also seem to be pretty leaky cores on both of mine seeing as their ASIC score is nearly identical (66.2 and 66.7). So I think the hypothesis regarding binning for power consumption and heat went out the window.
  18. Witcher 3 Love the game to absolute bits, but it's not perfect. It's prone to issues with AI pathfinding, collisions, the infamous Roach and very temperamental movement. The latter was caused by a conscious choice to go with animation fluidity (something that was lacking in Witcher 2) rather than absolute control fidelity (found it wasn't an issue in combat surprisingly). CDPR responded with an alternate movement response mode which even though I won't use because the movement is seared into my brain, I'd recommend fresh players start with it enabled. Trust me, it took me a long time to recognize its faults, I'm super biased in favor of this game. There may be more things I'm not aware of. Other than that, words cannot describe how I feel about the game. The story is incredibly nuanced, and the two expansion packs somehow manage to top each previous installment. Blood and Wine took already 10/10 writing and somehow took it to the next level. With Toussaint being a colorful world so far removed from the original war-torn world of Velen, it's legitimately as if you walked into a fairy tale. Also, Faux Norsemen in the Skellige Isles. Gorgeous place, awesome people. EDIT: I'm sorry, I could not help myself, HHHGNNN! Also, Ansel's pretty good. Wolfenstein New Order One of my favorite story-driven FPS games to date (up there with the Metros etc), let down at the very end by a very dodgy, cumbersome, and in contrast to the rest of the game, stale boss fight. Besides that, an extremely satisfying and varied experience. It took the Wolfenstein name and gave it a way more deep, dark and nuanced tone than it ever deserved. The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion It was the first ES game I ever spent any reasonable amount of time with (I was too late to appreciate Morrowind as it was already dated and rickety by the time Oblivion was out). I finished it, I enjoyed it, but it suffered from the usual array of Bethesda RPG issues, with the intermittent sparks of brilliance. What redeemed it eventually for me was The Shivering Isles expansion. The story and the world were pretty sublime at the time. Unfortunately somewhat hampered by the awkward combat, unnerving character interactions, the damn Conversation Pie™ and some repetitive scenery and the like. As a taster, the world of The Shivering Isles was divided into two. Mania and Dementia, ruled by a temperamental and capricious God of Madness. 'Nuff said. Star Wars Battlefront II (2005) To this day, extremely varied gameplay for what it is. Functional ground and vehicular combat, mixed with some campaigns and a different take on linear gameplay for Single Player playthroughs. The interface though... Oh the interface was absolutely atrocious. Even in the old days it looked like something a mod would implement over an existing game. Otherwise, the game was a hoot. B-17 Flying Fortress Very faithful representation of a WW2 B-17 bomber crew, with all the drama that entails. Excruciatingly detailed, but unless you were a hardcore Aviation nut, sitting through an 8 hour sortie in real time could tax the best of us. ARMA 3 The most versatile combat game of them all. Massive terrains, an essentially infinite number of gear (vanilla and mods), gorgeous Islands, bombastic scale, and the most awe-inspiring battles you'll ever see if you join a big group. Can accommodate an insane amount of people on the same server. Does a good job of spreading the emphasis on different vehicles, rather than everything just being complimentary to infantry. Horribly, massively, excruciatingly buggy. No joke, there are things ARMA players will put up with, that others would just call broken, leave a negative review on steam and post it on twitter as another example of what Steam will let through these days. For all its massive scale, it still can't quite take advantage of modern hardware properly and will invariably do its own thing performance-wise when it deems appropriate to do so. Got a 7900X and 2 1080tis? Great! Prepare to see anything from 150fps to 28. Better now with 64bit, and active development since its initial release in 2013, but you have to be a very patient human being. Cool little topic BTW, always like engaging in little discussions regarding this particular topic. It's a nice way of killing bias as well and not offering blind recommendations. It's why I, when asked "Is Witcher 3 any good?", I suppress the squealing, take a deep breath and go "I adore it, I'm very biased though, so maybe ask some people or watch a partial walkthrough to get a feel for it". It takes every ounce of mental strength I have. EDIT: Flavor
  19. NV is guilty of engaging in a lot of the same practices on account of complacency. Maybe not so much the tiny incremental updates, but price gouging for sure, some arbitrary tiers in product stacks and the like. Like, say, the still ridiculous proposition that is the Titan X. Maybe not so much now that they market it as a deep learning card. But 1200 bucks for a consumer GPU that has recently been deemed useless twice by something else they stuck into the stack arbitrarily? Yeah, that's capitalizing on your market share right there. Not to mention silly things like narrower memory bus, cost cutting and the likes. I'm not overly qualified to make statements regarding NV's architectural sandbagging, but I believe it's there. The saving grace, and the reason for the big improvements regardless of weak competition is the fact that, what the cards are used for, namely gaming, is advancing at quite a pace still. So NV sandbagging to the point where it holds back the gaming industry would make heads roll. The point is, these companies have so many moving parts, that it's hard not to look at the bottom line. It's all about sustaining and accelerating company growth. I'm not going to comment on whether that's a good or a bad thing, but that's what companies do. I won't call any of them great (maybe for their economic status in the market) I may call their products great, but otherwise, these aren't philanthropic institutions. They don't do it at a marginal profit in order for us to enjoy hardware. They do it because there's large sums of capital involved.
  20. I'm doing a few dry runs for some good before and after comparisons. Can't wait.
  21. That's why I mentioned broad strokes. I think what saved them was the restructuring. Amazing what you can do when there are just the right amount of cooks in the kitchen. Additionally, regarding Intel, I get what a lot of people say when it comes to "Try to develop the best product you can for the best price you can". The problem is, why? Why should they? I'm not condoning it, but these are businesses, not Nonprofits. Unless we're talking about a market with strong consumer protection, the only thing that I think would keep any big company like that in check is competition. Everyone gets complacent when dominating the market though, which is fortunate, as complacency makes mistakes, and mistakes piss people off.
  22. Man, oh, man. Haven't seen an industry-wide kerfuffle like this in ages. This is what competition looks like. This is also why I more or less blame AMD for the dry-stint and the stagnant core counts. They sat on their posteriors for way too long (I know that's a pretty broad stroke though). Now here's hoping this drive lasts, and AMD stays afloat to provide good products to instigate competition. Intel can come up with genuinely good offerings, but this sudden rush of core count, mainstream product leaks and the like does denote some sandbagging as this stuff is planned way in advance.
  23. You're f*cking joking... That is a gold mine. EF2000 even?? You just reminded me to go digging Sorry for the Potato Capture™, and sadly, I do feel somewhat disgraced on account of the lack of original packaging. I have its plastic case somewhere, but no idea where it is. Also, apologies for not contributing with a fresh purchase, but my nerdy sense was tingling.
  24. I will even go as far as agreeing regarding the former. The latter, on the other hand, has earned its place in my signature.
  25. Oh yeah, completely forgot about the follow function, thanks for the heads up. Also, I had a bit of a play and checking out the Nexus repository, everything's there as well. Been having some fun in the campaign again. Talk about freakin' variety. Also, if you can somehow download OBS, it can double as just straight-up capture software and you can even use the Nvidia Encoder so it doesn't tax your system. Lots of peeps keep complaining about quality with the NVENC for some reason, but I honestly can't see the issue if you feed it a high enough quality preset and bitrate. I recently dumped GFE just out of curiosity, and I can basically do everything Shadowplay did and more, without GFE (so one less thing running in the background as well).
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