How many people in your life actually understand the tech jargon?

[Alpha17x]

I was watching an LTT video from a few days ago; 'What the f*** is wrong with GPU pricing? - XFX RX 460 Review'.

And while listening to Luke lay out the specs of the card for everyone I found myself wondering how many people actually truly understand even a quarter of what he's saying;

 

"It's a fourth generation GCN architecture chip on Global Foundry's 14 nano-meter finFET process. It's got 14 compute units and 896 stream processors with reference boards running at a boost speed of 1200Mhz and a memory speed of 7Gbps with a peak performance of 2.2 Teraflops"  - Luke (In the video)He then continues, comparing it's performance to the 470.

 

The only reason I myself understand that is not from being a gamer but being involved in 3D asset production since the mid 90s. I had to learn what graphics cards could do in explicit detail to make absolutely certain I was getting performance for the price of some of the professional grade cards from that time. Most if not all of the terms and technologies from back then are antiquated and those terms not even in use anymore but the need to know stayed with me, so every time I hear something new such as the first time I heard 'finFET'; I looked it up and read about it in detail.

 

Part of this.... rant?  Came from a discussion with my cousin. He wanted to build the ultimate beast rig and his friend had specced out an impressive system for him, They both got mad at me when I pointed out that the games he plays and likely will play within the next 5 years will not use a fraction of what they specced out even while running at 60fps + on maximum detail, at maximum resolution. They both did the usual thing of saying they wanted we're trying to make the ultimate 'console'killer,  but a $700 system blindly purchased off the shelf at Best Buy is already the ultimate 'console killer'.  Just change a bunch of post processing settings, raise texture and model detail and you've got detail parity.

 

 His friend started doing the usual thing where someone wants to justify their specs or their purchase and all of that stopped the moment I asked him to explain how those spec were relevant. He couldn't.  All he really knew was how those very basic numbers tied in to the performance of some games, but not why they did, not in any real detail.  I certainly wouldn't expect him or most other people to understand it on the level of an engineer (I sure don't.) but I have to wonder how much money people have blindly wasted all while thinking they understood.  I've done this myself, I must admit.

 

In the end we scaled the computer down from around $5200 to $2100 with 1 GPU and left over money from his budget to go completely insane during the Steam Winter Sale.  Some people certainly need a $5200 computer.  

For my own part I have a work PC with dual xeons a quadro and some other crazy shit to drive the scenes I work on, a CPU based render slave (more xeons) , and a gaming/test rig with a 1080 so I can test finished software at an enthusiast level down to an entry level of hardware. Plus a home-made version of a storinator for active project and client asset back-ups. I also set my stuff up and my wife's stuff (she does music production and has twice as much crap as me) in a rack-mount configuration similar to what Linus did.  And I've gotta say thanks for that video Linus. We got about 30 feet of space back across two different rooms doing that.  

 

On the other hand we have most gamers, but not all. Who will buy a rig with 3 Geforce 1080 in custom cooling loop because they got a boner over how many CUDA cores each GPU has, when they don't know what the hell a CUDA core actually is and no real understanding of how it will effect the games they play or if their purchase will have any real effect beyond half the capability of the first card in the set.

It makes me think that not just AMD and Nvidia but many companies over-all have done excellent job of driving purchase and demand based on consumer ignorance while legitimately giving them the true and honest facts.  It's incredibly impressive.

 

[terrytek]

my friends don't even know what a stick of RAM is or looks like.

[RS2007GOD]

Ok i didnt read the whole thing but i have a couple friends who like tech but others litteraly have no idea what im talking and when i say im overclocking for example. I think they think its some kind of thing thats gona make my pc explode

[Guest]

3 minutes ago, terrytek said:

my friends don't even know what a stick of RAM is or looks like.

[RS2007GOD]

Also had another friend buy a 1500$ custom built pc and used the igpu for nearly 12months before i checked his cpuz and found he hadnt pluged into the gtx770

[deVIZtation]

No one really has taken the time to understand technical stuff. However I do have a few people in my life who understand a bit more than the basics. Knows what a CPU looks like, what RAM looks like, what a SSD and HDD is, etc.

[Inkz]

I find I can only really have successful tech conversations either on the forums,or in my Computer related classes in College. Also how the heck could you ever think you need a $5000 system for gaming. Even if you wanted to run games at 4k two 1080s can crush almost every game in 4k. Also because of scaling you should try to avoid multi-card setups due to other issues. Not to mention more than 2 card SLI is even more pointless this generation.

[DogeOfTech]

I'm sort of blessed in a way, since my dad does IT work (and has been for 20+/- years) for a government office, so I was raised learning this stuff. 

[spellmanuk]

luckly my dad is a 3rd line support technician so i have the someone to talk about this stuff to a couple of my friends know a little bit but not alot and my mom is the kind of person that thinks if you took sim card out your phone it would delete all your apps 

[minibois]

None of my family understand it that in depth, but I do have a couple family members who are interested in PC stuff and/or working in IT and understand PC stuff somewhat. In terms of friends, I have a couple (in real life) friends who understand this stuff just as much as me.

[Nexro]

Most of my friends can't tell the difference between RAM for the CPU, Or RAM for the GPU. They think that they'll need a GDDR5 Compatible motherboard...

[kaiju_wars]

Very few, my dad, some.  My step-dad, some.  My boss/friend, some.  

The people I work with do (but that's cause we work at, "The Computer Store").

But other people in my family?  My friends?  Nope.  Not a damn clue.

They just got that gaming laptop or that gaming desktop because it had a predator logo, or a shiny alien on the front.  Or it was red all over, and red means good!