My 5 year old, high end-ish rig is still quite relevant today. WTH, manufacturers ?!?

[melete]

11 minutes ago, Giganthrax said:

PCs aren't getting massively better for games mainly because 99% of AAA games today are made primarily for consoles, and consoles have crappy hardware. Once the next generation of consoles rolls in, we may see some serious jumps in graphical fidelity and therefore system requirements.

 

For actual professional productivity tasks like 3D design, video rendering, and so on, new PC parts are massively better than even the ones from 2-3 years ago. Just look at the differences in productivity tasks between Ryzen 3xxx and Ryzen 1xxx CPUs. 

Plenty of huge games are PC first, if not PC only. Dota 2, League of Legends, CSGO, PUBG, and Rocket League all come to mind. Most strategy games like Civ 6 and Paradox games. Virtually all RTS games. Sim games like Cities Skylines and the Sims 4. I think the console market is less influential than developers wanting their games to be accessible on a wide variety of PC hardware, which is especially true of the Esports titles here. And why design your game to use 16 CPU threads if your analytics say your players mostly have four to six threads?

[melete]

4 minutes ago, comander said:

Game engines are used to make games. 
Game engine design is often influenced by the consoles. 

Dota 2 and CSGO are on Source/Source 2, League is on its own engine, Civ 6 is on its own engine, Paradox's games are on the Clausewitz engine, Sims 4 is on its own engine, Cities Skylines is on Unity. All of these are PC game engines and off the top of my head only Source and SIms 4 have console ports (which were very much not console-first, they were ported). I wouldn't buy the argument that Unreal Engine games are compromised by that engine being multi-platform, either. There are plenty of outstanding PC titles on UE (way too many to list). What makes you think Unreal Engine is limiting PC games, exactly?

[KarathKasun]

5 hours ago, melete said:

Dota 2 and CSGO are on Source/Source 2, League is on its own engine, Civ 6 is on its own engine, Paradox's games are on the Clausewitz engine, Sims 4 is on its own engine, Cities Skylines is on Unity. All of these are PC game engines and off the top of my head only Source and SIms 4 have console ports (which were very much not console-first, they were ported). I wouldn't buy the argument that Unreal Engine games are compromised by that engine being multi-platform, either. There are plenty of outstanding PC titles on UE (way too many to list). What makes you think Unreal Engine is limiting PC games, exactly?

UE4 isnt limiting anything, its the underlying game design that is limiting performance many times.  The actual target market tends to be consoles at some point in the future.  Consoles have a higher TAM, so that is what you program for.

 

Cryengine is also atrocious, because it was built with 10ghz CPUs in mind.  Tech never went that direction so the underlying code has pretty poor scaling on real hardware.

[ianspy1]

for me AMDs new ryzen 9 lineup is pretty interesting since I work as a support of video edeting companys. Until recently Intel simpley was the better choice but the 12 core of the 3900x is acutally pretty nice or render load or AVID since it uses all 24 threads

[Kisai]

23 hours ago, Dr. FunFrock said:

Hi guys,

 

My current specs : 

-Core i7 5820k (The main reason of this whole rant. Don't get me wrong, I love it, but I bought it for 450€ at the time, I run it at a smooth 4.2GHz sustained without even increasing the voltage. It trashed the similarly priced 6700k and 7700k on most tasks, 8700k was barely better and the 9700k still isn't worth the upgrade, with the 9900k being considerably more expansive than what I paid at the time. WTF Intel ?!?)

That is still viable tech.

 

Here's the upgrade reasons:

 

*ALL*: Intel CPU exploits, HT exploits (eg Spectre/Meltdown/Zombieload and others), as no CPU currently solves all of these, you will be spinning your wheels until the 10th generation possibly solves most of them.

 

iX-yyy, iX-2yyy, i3yyy (eg Nehalem, Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge), are very obsolete. With these devices not supporting NVme, exploitable Hyperthreading, DDR3, PCIe 3.0 (Desktop Ivy Bridge only)

 

iX-4xxx, iX-5xxx, (Haswell, Broadwell) These support PCIe 3.0 , USB 3.0, DDR3 and NVme, though YMMV. AVX2 instructions, TSX introduced but then disabled.

 

Broadwell is 14nm, which is why it's still viable.

 

14nm This is the cut off point, anything that is Skylake or newer, is still "this generation" of CPU's, as they are still DDR4, PCIe 3.0, NVMe, TB3, USB 3.x supporting platforms.

iX-6xxx, iX-7xxx, (Skylake, Kaby Lake) These support DDR4, Thunderbolt 3, Intel SGX

 

10nm, ix-xxxx's 10th generation Ice Lake is supposed to have hardware protection against currently known sidechannel attacks, USB 3.1 gen 2 support, additional AVX512 instructions. 

 

Unless you are really wanting the latest greatest thing, there hasn't been a fundamental improvement that would justify a new CPU+RAM+MB combo if you have a Skylake or better system. If you have a Haswell or Broadwell system you may as well just hang onto it until the 10th generation Intel CPU if you still want Intel, or consider AMD's new Ryzen CPU's. Then you also get PCIe 4.0 (which might be short lived, but unless intel introduces PCIe 4.0 too, adoption might not be too swift.)

[alicskysareblue]

I finally made the jump to ryzen,, my old core i5 4670k is showing its age especially in virtualization game wise  most triple a games are using more then 6-8 cores .

 

[Uttamattamakin]

This is a good thing.  Computers have become more like cars.  Like... sure you CAN get a supercar to drive on the expressway to work... but a budget compact will get you to the same place at almost the same speed you're going to drive at anyway.  

 

The technology has matured. 

 

The days when a computer that was two years old literally could not do the things a new computer could* ended .... in the Early 2000's or even in the late 90's. 

*I don't mean do the same thing but slowly or stuttering... I mean could not do it at all. 

[Dabombinable]

Its the same for my rig. Though it of course over time has gone through piecemeal upgrades.

33 minutes ago, Uttamattamakin said:

This is a good thing.  Computers have become more like cars.  Like... sure you CAN get a supercar to drive on the expressway to work... but a budget compact will get you to the same place at almost the same speed you're going to drive at anyway.  

 

The technology has matured. 

 

The days when a computer that was two years old literally could not do the things a new computer could* ended .... in the Early 2000's or even in the late 90's. 

*I don't mean do the same thing but slowly or stuttering... I mean could not do it at all. 

That being said, you could force such an old computer (eg. one based on a K6-2 500) to actually handle the same tasks as one from 2004. Albeit with a lot of screwing around (more so than with a Celeron 300A/450).

[Uttamattamakin]

1 hour ago, Dabombinable said:

Its the same for my rig. Though it of course over time has gone through piecemeal upgrades.

That being said, you could force such an old computer (eg. one based on a K6-2 500) to actually handle the same tasks as one from 2004. Albeit with a lot of screwing around (more so than with a Celeron 300A/450).

Perhaps.   The stagnation of PC hardware has become more pronounced.   Right now I have a computer that is two or three generations old tech and ... I can't think of one thing I'd want to do that it absolutely could not do.   (I do do some GPGPU stuff for my research, which could benefit from a Titan V or RTX 2080Ti ... but that's an edge case.) 

OP, don't upgrade save your money and buy that much more of a computer in another couple of years.  Maybe by then there will have been a groundbreaking change.  IDK...cheap room temperature silicon based quantum computer processors of some kind?  (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-36476-z) maybe? 

[The King of the Undead]

mine sucks anyway.

[trag1c]

I have a very similar rig.

5820k at 4.7GHz

32GB 2666MHz

GTX 1080

 

It still crushes through most tasks but it is getting to the point where i am noticing a slow down. Especially in tasks where single threaded perf is paramount. Multithreaded tasks are still performed adequately but thats about it for these chips. Performance upgrades are no longer leaps and bounds any more but in that 5 years time 5% over last gen increase with every generation does add up very quickly. 

 

It ultimately tosses up to use case for performance increases but these rigs are getting to the point where it's starting to be noticeably slower than when they launched or a couple years after. Im looking to go for a ryzen 3900x next as it scales performance on both fronts.

[mr moose]

These threads always bring out the old tropes:

 

Games written to favor consoles, Intel sitting on asses, Nvidia sandbagging,  Trump monopolizes permanent wig market.

 

 

When looking at hardware and tech in general you have to evaluate the whole industry, not just the little bit that you directly observe.  All tech companies have been pushing development forward and none have rested on their laurels.  Games are not written to favor consoles in anyway, they are written on PC and ported to console. So at best they have just as much optimization for PC if not more before they even get to the optimization stage.  And yes trumps hair is fake, it's fake news and this is the single biggest problem with tech forums.  When the President of the US walks around with fake news on his head there is no way the general consumer can be more deeply observant of whole industries.

[Mira Yurizaki]

6 hours ago, mr moose said:

Games written to favor consoles, Intel sitting on asses, Nvidia sandbagging, 

The first and third point reminds me of something.

 

So what was that ray tracing and RTX thing everyone hated on?

[Cypher-Jackson]

This isn't the 90s/early 2000s anymore, where 1-3 years made your hardware absolutely unusable

[Kisai]

On 7/16/2019 at 8:11 AM, alicskysareblue said:

I finally made the jump to ryzen,, my old core i5 4670k is showing its age especially in virtualization game wise  most triple a games are using more then 6-8 cores .

 

 

Haswell is still fine, mostly the lack of DDR4 is the reason to upgrade it since you get more memory bandwidth then. But AAA games using 6 cores? Ha, none do. At best, games designed for the Switch use 4 cores, Xbox one and PS4 are designed to have 8 cores that run at half the speed of the quadcores's that are in desktop PC's, and aren't hyper threaded. So if you have a 4-core hyperthreaded CPU, you're not at any loss. Upgrading to a true 8-core will not get you improved performance in most cases as games are still designed around single-threaded "co-routines" when using a game engine like Unity. Nothing implicitly takes advantage of multiple cores except when programmed against the native "DX12/Vulkan" layer. Game developers are still resistant to using multiple cores as previously they've been not very good (see Xbox 360, PS3, GC/Wii/WiiU) for game usage. 

 

12 hours ago, mr moose said:

Games are not written to favor consoles in anyway, they are written on PC and ported to console. So at best they have just as much optimization for PC if not more before they even get to the optimization stage.  

Nah, the problem is people don't see past where their PC is not "just a gaming rig" and thus things that could be done to a PC to make it more gaming friendly are antithesis to using the PC for anything else. For example, using keyboards in games. A Keyboard is a super-kludgy game input device. A gamepad is a super-poor input device for anything "mouse cursor" or keyboard driven. 

 

Games are designed in a "least-common-denominator" fashion. This is why at E3/PAX you see a lot of nicer visuals, because they are running on development hardware, but when the game is released, it's dialed back to what the retail console can actually consistently do, not just the demonstration portions of the game. Nobody expects a $300 console to have the same performance of a $2000 gaming rig, and a game console has a shelf life of about 7 years, just like other consumer electronics. If it wasn't for Sony and Microsoft having a constant childish war over exclusives and cross-play, they'd realize that they should just produce ONE console together that plays each others games since their last two consoles have been essentially the same. Can you imagine if we had this kind of childish war over TV's? Where you could only hook up Sony kit to Sony TV's? Samsung kit to Samsung TV's ? No, they want you to buy their hardware because it works with everything, and maybe you'll use their TV's SmartTV OS so they can make money off their own app store instead of you giving money to Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo. The sooner Microsoft and Sony realize this, they'd realize people could just pick one or the other's services, or even both and not have to have so many stupid boxes that do the same thing in their living room. Netflix, Crunchyroll/VRV, HBO, Hulu, Amazon apps would even make the game console viable options over the rubbish-tier SmartTV SoC's in cheap TV offerings.

 

But really gaming and UHD video is the only thing driving specs still. Microsoft office doesn't need 8GB+ of RAM and a 4Ghz CPU. But I've run into more than one occasion where "good enough" was in fact, not. All these "web-experience" type of apps chew up CPU and RAM despite offering no advantage over their 15 year older versions that were written in native C/C++.

[mr moose]

7 hours ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

So what was that ray tracing and RTX thing everyone hated on?

Volta and RTX were both the end result of Nvidia doing nothing while milking the general consumer with new products every 6-8 months. 

[Mira Yurizaki]

3 minutes ago, mr moose said:

Volta and RTX were both the end result of Nvidia doing nothing while milking the general consumer with new products every 6-8 months. 

I was more implying that people have been wanting the "next Crysis" for a while.

 

Then ray tracing and all that comes out and people don't want anything to do with it. Though I guess in this case the visual quality wasn't that massive of a jump in the first run of things 

[mr moose]

1 minute ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

I was more implying that people have been wanting the "next Crysis" for a while.

 

Then ray tracing and all that comes out and people don't want anything to do with it. Though I guess in this case the visual quality wasn't that massive of a jump in the first run of things 

 

That too. 

[Xplo1t]

Unless I'm pushing a very specific workload, I'm hard pressed telling a difference between my older HEDT, the 2700X or even the 9900k build.  The biggest reason for the builds is keeping the hobby alive.

[Giganthrax]

On 7/16/2019 at 1:24 AM, melete said:

Plenty of huge games are PC first, if not PC only. Dota 2, League of Legends, CSGO, PUBG, and Rocket League all come to mind. Most strategy games like Civ 6 and Paradox games. Virtually all RTS games. Sim games like Cities Skylines and the Sims 4. I think the console market is less influential than developers wanting their games to be accessible on a wide variety of PC hardware, which is especially true of the Esports titles here. And why design your game to use 16 CPU threads if your analytics say your players mostly have four to six threads?

These are all esports titles, and esports titles deliberately don't use high end graphics so that as many people as possible can play them. Strategy games are a niche market mostly, for instance Civ6 only has 22k players playing right now according to Steam Charts. 

 

What I'm talking about is the big AAA games like Red Dead, CoD, Battlefield, Star Wars, sports games, Tomb Raider, etc., that are marketed in large part through presentation, which means fancy graphics and a hard-on for Hollywood. I think once we get a new generation of consoles, we will certainly see a considerable graphical quality increase in these titles, as that's a big part of how they get their sales. 

[Murasaki]

perpare for cringe: F U T U R E P R O O F

[RejZoR]

Futureproof building is a thing. CPU and motherboard are things that age the slowest if you buy it well. And not skimping on these two, you can keep core platform (CPU+MOBO+RAM) for very long time without any upgrades and just shuffle graphic cards which get outdated the first. Also platform upgrade is the most cost intensive expense and requires the most work with (usually) minimal returns. If I swap the X99 platform now for 3900X and X570, I'm looking at expense of 1000€ and I'd gain somewhere between 5-15fps depending on game (productivity workloads are irrelevant for me). It's just not cost effective considering my framerate is already so high I just don't care with everything cranked to max. I'll rather dump 500-800€ into new graphic card in 1-2 years and gain way more fps. Like WAY MORE. It's smart to overbuild the core platform a bit even if it costs a bit more at the moment as it actually gives you better cost in the long run and experience as well since you have a capable CPU and tons of RAM all this time.

 

With graphic cards, it depends. Regularly swap mid end cards and always have mid end performance but you always have latest tech available, or you pick something stupid fast and stick with it for longer at expense of maybe missing out on certain tech (like FidelityFX for AMD and RTX for NVIDIA at the moment) in the long run.

 

I'll go with new platform when AMD's AM5 hits the market and hopefully AMD continues their winning streak. I'm assuming DDR5 RAM and PCIe 4.0 will be a standard then as well. Which will be a perfect time for a full platform swap.

[hojnikb]

To be fair, a cost "effective" way of gaming is really not using PC at all. Consoles as a whole are really cheap (can't really get a decent PC for that kind of money), adequate for most people and as an added bonus, you can grab used games for cheap. And because hardware is a constant for the duration of the generation (which is usually 6-7 years) you really don't have to upgrade anything within this time frame.

 

The only real downside is paid online play, but that kinda pays itself with "free" games.

 

 

[WereCatf]

1 hour ago, hojnikb said:

And because hardware is a constant for the duration of the generation (which is usually 6-7 years) you really don't have to upgrade anything within this time frame.

Not quite, see e.g. PS4 vs PS4 Pro.

[alicskysareblue]

On 7/17/2019 at 3:46 PM, Kisai said:

 

Haswell is still fine, mostly the lack of DDR4 is the reason to upgrade it since you get more memory bandwidth then. But AAA games using 6 cores? Ha, none do. At best, games designed for the Switch use 4 cores, Xbox one and PS4 are designed to have 8 cores that run at half the speed of the quadcores's that are in desktop PC's, and aren't hyper threaded. So if you have a 4-core hyperthreaded CPU, you're not at any loss. Upgrading to a true 8-core will not get you improved performance in most cases as games are still designed around single-threaded "co-routines" when using a game engine like Unity. Nothing implicitly takes advantage of multiple cores except when programmed against the native "DX12/Vulkan" layer. Game developers are still resistant to using multiple cores as previously they've been not very good (see Xbox 360, PS3, GC/Wii/WiiU) for game usage. 

 

Nah, the problem is people don't see past where their PC is not "just a gaming rig" and thus things that could be done to a PC to make it more gaming friendly are antithesis to using the PC for anything else. For example, using keyboards in games. A Keyboard is a super-kludgy game input device. A gamepad is a super-poor input device for anything "mouse cursor" or keyboard driven. 

 

Games are designed in a "least-common-denominator" fashion. This is why at E3/PAX you see a lot of nicer visuals, because they are running on development hardware, but when the game is released, it's dialed back to what the retail console can actually consistently do, not just the demonstration portions of the game. Nobody expects a $300 console to have the same performance of a $2000 gaming rig, and a game console has a shelf life of about 7 years, just like other consumer electronics. If it wasn't for Sony and Microsoft having a constant childish war over exclusives and cross-play, they'd realize that they should just produce ONE console together that plays each others games since their last two consoles have been essentially the same. Can you imagine if we had this kind of childish war over TV's? Where you could only hook up Sony kit to Sony TV's? Samsung kit to Samsung TV's ? No, they want you to buy their hardware because it works with everything, and maybe you'll use their TV's SmartTV OS so they can make money off their own app store instead of you giving money to Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo. The sooner Microsoft and Sony realize this, they'd realize people could just pick one or the other's services, or even both and not have to have so many stupid boxes that do the same thing in their living room. Netflix, Crunchyroll/VRV, HBO, Hulu, Amazon apps would even make the game console viable options over the rubbish-tier SmartTV SoC's in cheap TV offerings.

 

But really gaming and UHD video is the only thing driving specs still. Microsoft office doesn't need 8GB+ of RAM and a 4Ghz CPU. But I've run into more than one occasion where "good enough" was in fact, not. All these "web-experience" type of apps chew up CPU and RAM despite offering no advantage over their 15 year older versions that were written in native C/C++.

So I was wrong meh...whatever, ryzen was still a massive upgrade and I dont regret it.