Build Thread 3.0

[LadyCrimson]

Is the 5090 out yet?

 

 

I was fine with DLSS/FSR/whatever being available as a way to extend life of older gpu's/allow lower end rigs to keep playing a while, or just as one user-optimization option.
I'm less fine with dev's pushing it as almost the only user-optimization, where fiddling with (other) settings more and more often does very little to increase performance, plus at least on paper listing DLSS etc. as something you need on for the "system requirements."
I love me some shiny graphics at times, although I've never cared about "Ultra" at all, but could we focus more on gameplay now instead of marketing uber lighting/shadows/effects and hyper real (but still uncanny valley) faces and figures while waiting for gpu tech or dev. engine programming skills to catch up a bit?

 

 

 

Edited August 31, 2023 by LadyCrimson

[Bartimaeus]

1 hour ago, LadyCrimson said:

hyper real (but still uncanny valley)

what i really need with modern games is a 'playstation 1 graphics' mode/switch: less strain on my gpu, less strain on my brain because all the nasty uncanny valley crap immediately goes away

[majestic]

So, AMD sponsors Starfield to make sure that the 7900 XTX can beat the RTX 4090 in something and to have a game everyone wants to play bundled with their cards, but forgets to make sure that the game runs well on their CPUs. Given Bethesda's track record of making terrible code, I guess the 7900 XTX edging out the RTX 4090 wasn't even intentional*.

Not going to lie, seeing the 13600K punching out of the entire AMD CPU stack (including the 7950X, 7800X3D and 7950X3D) in Starfield is hilarious, and the 12600K coming within 10% of the 7950X3D is just bonkers - as is the general performance of the game in 1080p. 67 FPS on average on a 5800X3D/RTX 4090 combination? Yikes. If the game at least had something to show for it, but that's visually just... bad. Never mind those horrible plastic faces. Ugh.

*More objectively that is probably a result of being specifically optimized for AMD cards while doing no optimization for any other GPUs, and less of a toggle that goes like if (!Radeon) frameLimit = 0.8;

Edited September 5, 2023 by majestic

[Keyrock]

Starfield is built on a 12 year old Frankenstein's monster of an engine if you only count the time when it was called Creation Engine, or a 20 year old engine if you go all the way back to Gamebryo. There have been so many modifications grafted onto the engine over the years, not to mention there's undoubtedly a whole slew of legacy cruft weighing it down that no longer applies to any machine modern enough to actually play the game at something approaching acceptable framerates. I never expected to see particularly good performance. That said, hopefully Bethesda puts in some optimizations because even less tragic numbers like these are still pretty bad:

Given there's no ray tracing those numbers are quite sad.

The conspiracy theorist in me is starting to suspect that upscalers like DLSS, FSR, and XeSS might have been one of the worst things to happen to gaming in a long time. It just seems like games are not getting much better looking while at the same time getting much worse performing. My conspiracy theorist side thinks that maybe devs are shirking their duties in optimizing figuring "meh upscalers will fix the performance". It's similar to how Star Wars writers will sometimes not think too far ahead and write themselves into a corner because they always have the crutch to lean on of deus ex machina-ing themselves out of any situation because the force.

Edited September 5, 2023 by Keyrock

[Zoraptor]

3 hours ago, majestic said:

*More objectively that is probably a result of being specifically optimized for AMD cards while doing no optimization for any other GPUs, and less of a toggle that goes like if (!Radeon) frameLimit = 0.8;

It would be funny if the CPU performance delta was because they were using one of those Intel libraries that pretty much literally does exactly that.

Otherwise, you don't really need to depart from a variation of Poe's Law* when it's a new title from Bethesda. Though as above, considering the engine's age that it just works™ at all is a bit of a miracle.

*Howard's Law: any performance issues in a Bethesda game can be adequately explained by it being a Bethesda game in the first place.

[majestic]

2 minutes ago, Zoraptor said:

It would be funny if the CPU performance delta was because they were using one of those Intel libraries that pretty much literally does exactly that.

According to some modders they think the overall poor (CPU) performance of the game is because Bethesda messed up compiler optimizations. The go-to explanation for the relatively poor performance of the Ryzen CPUs seems to be the bandwidth limitation of AMD's Infinity Fabric. It was basic memory speed before, but recent testing showed that to not be the case, the game actually scales less well with increased DDR5 speeds than other titles.

As for Intel's libraries that check for the vendor string and use slow execution paths for anything that is not an Intel CPU, well, they're not very likely to be used in desktop applications or games, but I would not put it past Bethesda either way, but I'd like to think AMD would at least do a cursory check when they spend a good bunch of money on a product.

[Zoraptor]

There's zero chance of Bethesda actually using one of those Intel libraries, though it would make for superb lolz.

[majestic]

Well, looks like 2025 is going to be the year of ARM replacing the x86 CPUs.

 

Spoiler

Yeah, that'll probably also be the year of the Linux Desktop, coming yearly since '96 or so.

 

[Keyrock]

4 hours ago, majestic said:

Well, looks like 2025 is going to be the year of ARM replacing the x86 CPUs.

 

  Hide contents

Yeah, that'll probably also be the year of the Linux Desktop, coming yearly since '96 or so.

 

I've been having my own personal year of the Linux desktop since around 2002. As for ARM, can we fast forward to where RISC-V replaces both x86 and ARM? That's what I'm looking forward to.

[majestic]

Nice. Can stop rifling through videos whenever I need to reference a chart now.

[Humanoid]

Having a semi-abandoned zombie website always did look a bit unprofessional and "small time", so to speak. Glad they're addressing it.

[majestic]

This is one of those "well, duh!" tests.

No, really, are you telling me that unless you're hitting the CPU limit in games, it is better value to go with a less powerful CPU and a more powerful GPU than vice versa?

Nice to see with the lower settings in Fortnite, where the better gaming CPU results in much higher frame rates due to both GPUs being far away from being GPU-bound*. So, basically, for any non e-sports scenarios, or unless you're playing Factorio exclusively and can notice the difference between 400 and 700fps, a 13600k/7600 will easily be enough. Go with the higher powered GPU if you're on a budget.

Guess it's nice to have proof to link to.

*Minor caveat, in some cases turning on ray tracing in games can lead to the 7800X3D outperforming the 7600 with the 4070 Ti. But even then it is really minor.

[Sarex]

I'm pretty sure that for Civ/Strategy turned based games CPU is more important, and builders like city skylines.

[majestic]

Like I said, if you play Factorio, going with the better CPU is a good idea...

[Bartimaeus]

boot up pc, freezes and crashes after a few minutes

reboot pc, freezes and crashes after a few minutes

restart pc, boot into bios, it's all in chinese

find english language option, stays in chinese

yeah, alright, i can take a hint, i'm clearly not wanted anymore

[Bartimaeus]

A co-worker from a different department brought her laptop that wouldn't charge its battery anymore to a local PC repair shop, and they went and changed its operating system from Windows 10 to Windows 11 without asking her, and it FUBAR-ed her operating system, e.g. wi-fi doesn't work anymore, browser crashes upon opening every time, start menu doesn't open at all, random blue screens, etc. They didn't bother to test anything before handing it back to her, and they didn't fix the charging issue anyways. She tried a system repair, the ol' always-recommended-yet-always-pointless SFC repair, not doing it. She also just, like, didn't want Windows 11. I think she can maybe do a complete rollback to Windows 10, if she can figure out how - not something I've ever personally done myself, to be honest. Could maybe also try uninstalling her old system drivers and re-installing versions for Windows 11 to see if that fixes the worst problems, but it sounded like the issues were too severe and widespread for it to be worth the bother. I'd be pretty apoplectic if somebody ever tried to pull a stunt like this on me...but uh, I guess that's why I handle my own affairs: if something ever goes wrong, I can only blame myself, .

Edited March 9 by Bartimaeus

[Sarex]

Bought a new higher capacity battery from lenovo. I waited a month for it and now when I got it I open the box and see the manufactured date is 2021.10... I guess I will give it a try, but age and li-ion batteries don't go well together...

[Bokishi]

Got me some 96GB of DDR5 6600. I got room for 192 gigs, but 4 sticks of DDR5 is still a bad idea

[Keyrock]

I'm going to post this here for lack of a better place to put it and because it doesn't warrant its own thread.

Here's the link in case it didn't embed correctly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swoIPD7EvEw

As someone who previously didn't give any thought to the nitty-gritty of how media encoding and decoding work, I found this fascinating. I still don't fully know how they work, I didn't completely understand everything in this video, but I certainly have a much better idea of the process of encoding and decoding now.

Edited April 3 by Keyrock

[Sarex]

On 4/1/2024 at 11:30 AM, Sarex said:

Bought a new higher capacity battery from lenovo. I waited a month for it and now when I got it I open the box and see the manufactured date is 2021.10... I guess I will give it a try, but age and li-ion batteries don't go well together...

Finally got around to installing it. Surprisingly the battery was above design capacity and after doing a recalibration it seems to have lost less than 1% capacity.

[Sarex]

Does anyone have a recommendation for a Switch with the following specs:

- at least two 10gb ports

- at least two PoE ports

- and between 10 and 16 2.5 gb ports (or faster) edit: thinking about it. they don't really need to be that fast, but I would like to have at least two (apart from the 10gb ports) that are 2.5 for the access points

- without fans (or very quiet)

Edited April 13 by Sarex

[Keyrock]

MSI gonna MSI 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZG-WP8A_2c

tl;dw - The MSI Claw is a mess and presents the worst value proposition of all the currently available PC handhelds on the market. There is literally no reason to buy it whatsoever.

 

Edited April 15 by Keyrock

[majestic]

Fake news by AMD to make Intel look bad! I have a 13700k and had no stability problems in Hogwart's Legacy or Lies of P.

Actually, Lies of P is one of the most stable games I have played in years. Not a single techincal issue, never mind crashing, and I have played it for roughly one hundred hours.

No, but seriously, if simply going by the comments of people having the described problem, they all seem to be having a rather diverse range of reasons. Plenty of people with Asus mainboards, but not exclusively. Putting in the proper power limits or manually underdlocking the CPU appears to solve the problems.

Guess Intel, just like AMD, isn't looking too closely at what Asus puts as their default settings in their BIOS. Looks like it could be a similar degredation issue, sans the exploding CPUs and all.

[Malcador]

Building a PC these days seems more of a headache than 5-6 years ago, at least being concerned with QA issues.

[Humanoid]

Yeah, AMD in a BIOS update around a year ago clamped down hard on how much voltage the motherboard vendors could feed the CPU to stop exploding CPU issue, and more generally the motherboard arms race, in its tracks. Not exactly the same as a power limit, but the same idea in essence.

Intel are for now happy to stay in the grey area where they can use the arms race to make themselves look a couple percent better in benchmarks while maintaining plausible deniability. I am in no way absolving the motherboard vendors for acting like complete cowboys, but it is with tacit endorsement from Intel.