If you're new to PC gaming or haven't paid attention to how graphics cards work (we've all been there).. or if you say this often; My CPUS seem FASTZ! why no GOOD GRAFIX?? bad feelz! haha
There is a simple way to remember all this graphics card junk.
Shaders.. MOAR shaderz!!
2000+ shaderz + decent other core parts + decent Vram (2GB/3GB/4GB/MOAR!)
Means you can pace at a decent frame rate.. Crossfire and SLI for each card doubles many of these things but not all. SLI scaling is something beautiful these days.. I haven't tried Crossfire but AMD guys seem to keep complaining about the drivers and with my new, 280x I can see why, with gimped features. ...lovin' the 3GB Vram & 2048 shaders though.
Each of the 2048 shader cores has a clock rate just like your CPU.. speed them up and the PC finds it easier to create the game.
These days I would recommend no less than 1024 shaders for any medium 1080p gaming build. but really you should be thinking about trying to get around 1500+ & 2GB of Vram for a medium build.
Rob mentioned James' GTX 660ti 3GB, that's a great card, and he's correct, these days Vram is sooo important for many games, simply put: the shaders and AA (detail) are what you see, the Vram is how quickly it is loaded. there's more about bit bus but thats for another day.
If you dial up the settings to maxout, everything's going to slow down becuase that takes a lot more work.. so less shaders means you put lower settings and everything will work as it should. or overclock the shaders you have..but be careful you don't burn down your house or fry the card or go on holiday to the seaside for a decorative hat.
left the PC on battlefield!
paused!
Of course there's loads more factors but these days as long are you have a reasonable CPU (current gen for AMD and Intel) and 8 to 32GB of RAM (I recommend 16GB @ 1866mhz) you should be G2G.. SSD doesn't hurt either. but HDD 7200rpm yes will run games fine.
External Power Supplies & Secondary PSU's have been in demand for around a decade now.. but as yet, no one company has stepped up to the challenge; With the exception of NesteQ, which is altogether ugly solution, I still commend them for trying.
Where is FSP? Where is NZXT? Where is Zalman? Where is EVGA?
Have you too many optical bays?? I do too.. if we could get a extra PSU to fit within these extra bays, and a power header cable to connect that would be great! instead of the case power switch connecting straight to the motherboard it could have its own recessed slot in the secondary PSU, which then has a similar cable leading to the motherboard to trip the primary PSU via the normal motherboard method.
WHY would anyone want these.. I think manuf. think 'this is crazy, these guys spend a fortune on their rigs and don't want to buy a higher wattage PSU??' to reply, sometimes, it's just far too much hassle to disassemble your rig*, especially if you're on water, other times, it becomes totally impractical, for instance if you were to buy a PSU and only need another 200w for a third graphics card, speaking from experience there.. and in my situation right now.. I have a HP* proprietary PSU, non-standard ATX with pins the wrong way round. its £120 for the 600w version, which is just insulting.
If I could buy a Secondary 500w 80plus bronze PSU for £60, that would solve my problem.. I could have as many cards as I wish in my PC. to be clear, that's what I feel many want that ability for; to power all their cards and a few drives.. that's it.
The big ugly cable problem.. well I thought of a solution to that problem..have a clip for one of the back card slots and once the cable is inside the PC.. it doesn't need to be big and ugly anymore huh? just a normal slim one with very generous slack enabling us to cable tidy. individual wires still somewhat thick and each can be routed to the power in port which no longer needs to be a kettle plug, but could be for each power wire.
The PCIE and drive power cables could be very flat and be ready to to be hidden. sleeving could be another option, but now more and more retailers are selling sleeving, which is frankly superb!
Sometimes companies are dumb.. they see a market but for whatever reason they don't take advantage of it.. this is ten years of people asking for secondary and external PSU's.. so I guess who is first to this market will clean up.. and then THEY will be the ones in the need of a calculator not us! :D
peace
Dava
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*if I have my PC settled and I dont want to mess with it and just make a slight upgrade, this becomes first choice!
*Don't get me wrong HP are coming along these days, the old HP I hope is changing. Buying their products at times is little like buying Mac, but then they had that nightmare of a website for many many years.
I have a HP Z400/W3550 then w/X5650 Xeon upgraded .. got this PC a three weeks ago, very happy.
In my last post I wrote about Bethesda's release schedule & Development for future Devs but I also mentioned their sister studio Zenimax Online in the notes.. this reminded me of a pet hate I have, that I have not had to think about for many many years.. advertising campaigns; ones that are so far from the reality of the playing experiance it ruins the game. ..seriously.
To let the corps know.. give your ad dept half a chance and they will ruin your game.. full stop. It is widely known in the advertising industry, biggest liar wins if they fool their corp heads. for games the biggest liars are the renderers.. they render a cartoon of something, because they do not feel the game is strong enough for 'in-game footage only' or they are inexperienced in the particular industry they are promoting the product to.
I am not going to be unkind to those guys.. they are just doing a job, but if you watch the movie 'crazy people' there was a revolution in the advertising industry around 25 years ago. This movie is a parody of the quite real revolution.. which was started by the people who advertised 'Ronseal', this was the first advert to tell customers the truth, and they responded in droves. Ronseal is a wood and metal sealer, to protect your outside structures from the weather.
'does exactly what is says on the tin'
Very famous lines, and a practicality that meant people knew they were not lied to.
Zenimax Online's ESO advert, was appalling compared to the actual in game event, which from what I have seen was nothing more than a small place with a few NPC's fighting.
To Zenimax Online, you are a new studio, so mistakes will be made, that's just life, but I'm sure you know and accept this. However, you need to keep a very tight rein on your ad department from now on.. it's a little like, the 'cock of the walk' biggest liar wins works in many industries, they are taught this..but not in the games industry.. and ESPECIALLY in sub-based MMO's as you have now found out regarding all the hate fans poured out for you. 'cagey'.. is not even a sufficient word for a new MMO advert.. you will make already dedicated fans into crazy fans quite easily with even a small shift change in the format of the game..RENDERING a advert is suicide. Blizzard/WoW Valve/DoTA get away with slight rendering because their fans already know what to expect, you were launching a new game, oh man!
please keep in mind, for MMO's, the ad dept is like a seagull and you have a sandwich.. the seagull wants the sandwich and if you let your guard down, it will take it from you, and all you're left with is a mess on the ground. Finding Nemo; 'MINE!'.
Of course, you can do mixes of rendering and in-game footage for single player games.. gamers in-general HATE it, but yeah it can be done..we ONLY like in game footage.. it makes us happy.
Gearbox/2k advertised 'A BAZILLION GUNS' all with in-game footage.. were we disappointed? no! fans still flock to that game. that was smart. that was truthful.
Sony did an excellent job controlling the hype of DCUO, at first its just a render cartoon, and while you are watching you're thinking 'ohw man it's never going to be *this* good.. they probably won't including flying, the powers will be limited and the girls much less sexy'.. well.. that was, wrong, wrong and wrong. And while it sounds hypocritical, once you can fly around the TWO full cities at leisure, you start to see the beauty of what they were doing, but not just any cities, these are ones I have known since childhood, Metropolis and Gotham... rem DCUO is Free2Play too, and only a £5 purchase means you get a slight upgrade to membership permanently, without subscription.
But what Sony really did correctly is how they structured your involvement in said cartoon, you were the answer to their (the Justice League's) problem, I'm finding this hard to explain this without you knowing the specifics, but you were the answer and in this they DID NOT lie. and they didn't gimp the powers either, neither for free or premium or Sub-based (Legendary).. you have access to all Superman's powers right from the start, to Batman's, to Wonder Womans.
So you are about to tell a child there is no Santa.. how can you be so cruel to formally tell them they are about to receive their true wish, 'if you good and are on the good list and buy our game'; knowing all along it is a lie.
YOU just can't do that with MMO's. the hate will haunt Zenimax and the employees for a few years yet. And that's a shame coz for *some* moronic reason, the ad dept did NOT focus on the truly awesome size of ESO, which in itself is a HUGE selling point for fans. whyyy?? just be honest..there was no reason to render a lie when you have already a MASSIVE selling point.. ESO is a continent.. Tamriel. showing this in adverts( again in-game only), at least would have controlled the hype, and not lead to disappointment, and much nerd-rage..tbh WELL deserved nerd-rage.
Here is games reviewer Angry Joe's vid on ESO.
I heartily agree with him on many many points.
You can't milk a long term investment without hurting your long-term credibility as a company.
MMO's are 'drip-drip' not 'cash-cash'.
So yesterday I saw a mention of Tango & Bethesda's 'The Evil Within' instantly I knew it was a remake of Silent Hill, looks well done after watching the vid. yes, Capcom* will be mad haha.
What they are doing is smart business.. they are expanding their portfolio..they are a big hitter now, and have both a weight on their shoulders, and great opportunities. But with that comes 'Great Expectations'...
I am a huge Fallout fan.. having around 3000 hours play*.. I am waiting for Fallout 4, but I realise they are milking while waiting, but like I said that's smart business practice.. what I don't appreciate is the schedule.
Here is hopefully peacefully*, a schedule that I feel is fair to both devs and players.
Dev's have 4 years to make a main game, with a 2 year schedule for a second tier, second tier doesn't mean 'second rate' it is the experimental branch of the main series given to a similar studio, with similar ideas for a release 2 years after the main title*, this alleviates the gamers desires. boosts profits, and builds the series into a franchise. also I feel, just smart business practise.
As a company if you get a lot of 'Shut up and take my money' from fans, then they have unsated desires, and you have business opportunity*, Beth is amazing with fans, really, the GECK with an all out stoke of genius, shows a kind side in a business where that is hard to do without putting work into something and giving it away for free, the exception being the kit itself, but then the ten's of thousands of mods users get mods for free from ModDevs.. who Beth are again being the leader of the industry in encouraging the new talent to code and texture from grass roots.. again genius, beneficent.
I want a new Fallout.. flip I think there are people in the arctic who want a new fallout..its been too long, the GECK takes the pressure off for now, and we have Skyrim to play with and pretend its Fallout..but I can't help feeling Beth could have asked Obsidian to put out another Fallout in the meantime.. even approaching Dev Teams* and suggesting funding and direction, seeing the skill and sharing the skill between both. Dev Teams have real-life jobs, OB could provide a future to such teams..saying if you're in, then we will re-hire you for our second tier. And while the project was being finished, hire & pay them for the duration. that's good stuff on your resume.. hired by Obsidian..wow.
tbh I'd have paid for Project Brazil.. around £5 sounds fair. mini-quel three-parter easy money, why? because the devs love what they are doing.. you really think they clock off at 5?* haha.
Skyrim's engine supports HDT physics, this makes me think that if these engines are/were in some way modular, why not all engines, why do we need multiple engines.. couldn't the industry as a whole come together in a initiative, and make ONE game engine, that is FULLY modular, like browsers are these days, when skyrim came out, there was no physics, now with a simple* plug-in and the coding of the game from the ground up.. it's possible.. ANYTHING is possible, textures can always be added, so as long as the engine can handle what is going on, it won't crash, so a *highly* stable engine under a myriad of conditional plug-ins. We Beth fans oft joke about Beth's coding (well for fallout hehe)..but they have improved drastically in the last ten years..
Fallout was 2007 but like the weather 'feels like 2004'.
but they have improved drastically in the last 7 years. :))
Is this a trite whine for Fallout 4..?..?... YOU BET!
You are amazing but now you are disparaging people who obviously believe in you. myself included. .. 7 years is not good enough and no amount of Silent Hill's will make that to a professional release standard.
here's some music I was listening to while writing.. I found it apt.
yes she has boobs.. but shhh.. she might not notice.
peace.
Dava
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* update: (oops Konami.. Capcom was Res. Evil)
*3 Xbox plays inc. my brothers + PC
* (even though I'm pretty nerd-raged haha)
*with each main title come an updated/upgraded engine/graphics & physics scheme, and the main game can contain the choicest picks from the second tier ideas that were liked, and ditch the unpopular ones. it's win win!
* (Project Brazil unfinished )
* I hear on youtube, many are displeased with Zenimax Studios/ ESO, while they are a new studio, they broke the cardinal rule: never overhype.
if a online MMO doesn't do hype well.. believe me it gets talked about coz of the subscription based nature.. this is something I feel Sony avoided with DCUO, they did exactly what it said on the tin..keeps the crazy fans calm..you are telling a child there is no Santa, try it again without the crystal meth. that comment is aimed at the advert Zenimax Online had; that 'Angry Joe' a games reviewer, so succinctly demonstrated, was not only far from advertised, was poor for inde devs, nevermind a company with funding. ..much funding. rem to keep a tight leash on the ad dept, they will ruin your game given half a chance. IF your game is NOT good enough for 'in game footage only' then there is something wrong with the game. period.
* ease of use for end users
*I DO NOT endorse overworking though, as with the legend of Bondi studios.. what was revealed, was truly shocking, and I commend R* for stepping in and being merciful to those workers.
Recently, I had a problem, my rig died in a water incident, since then I have been searching for a way to build a rig while still saving for my OH to come to this country, we are applying for her VISA soon and it costs enough that I do not have cash to spare.
I have the remaining parts from the original rig, but don't know which is faulty and have no way to test, I also have a C2Q 6600 and could buy a board that took DDR3, but alas! only 2gb modules are supported.. I have 4x4GB. My first reaction is ..to build one of your fine APU offerings, best IGP money can buy, can even game at 720 properly ..or partially at 1080.. this is some feat and I congratulate you on such a task undertook.
But now to what I discovered.. it boggles the mind.. WHY if I buy a 7850k and a R7 250 are the extra shader cores disabled??
The 7850k has 512 shader cores and the highest Dual Graphics Radeon supported card has.. 384.. crossfire NEEDS these to be equal or it shuts off shader cores!! why why why?? .. was this just an oversight..please tell me this was just an oversight.. please DON'T WRECK your plan for system on chip, by thinking marketing ploys will still work for APU's.. for APU's it doesn't work the same way it did in the past..
For example.. a motherboard manufacturer wants a price cap, they say, this is our low end motherboard its marketings responsibility to price it accordingly..they come back the R&D and say, we want to limit the features... to justify the price..*usually* they limit the RAM speed..but Homer Simpson DOH! APU's relies so heavily on RAM speed.. you are gimping your product.. and so the whole platform. the LOWEST RAM speed for APU mobos, at the poor end should be 1866 here.. the high end enthusiast being 2666mhz. supported and QVL'd.
In a more complicated way you are doing a similar thing, by thinking you can have different specs for cards and APU's. you can't..well, you can but you destroy the idea of apu's being a platform.
your highest APU the 7850k has 512 shaders, 32 texture, 8 rendering cores.. so you needed only ONE card in the Radeon line up to match this EXACTLY for YOUR idea to work..you spent.. xxxxx dollars already developing and marketing the idea to your customers and fans, spending money to create a building structure for PC builders to find easy to understand. but.. POOF.. gone!! when marketing decided.. 'erm lets put the cores at 384'. And if you wait for the next hardware refresh to fix this.. it will be even worse in the mind of consumers.. why? because the gamers & builders..like myself you have now screwed, with no performance upgrade path, by ending the 990FX chipset chain.
please just for once.. be sensible and respond to a glaring oversight. release a R7 255 Dual Graphics card. matched exactly to your top apu.
You can't price cap these things in the traditional way.. it works differently. you can cap the CPU side yes, and it slows ..everything.. down..but capping the gpu or cards slowly 'chips away' at the work you have already done building the idea of what a apu should be. YOU AMD are the leader in this field..you can't make such gaffs and hope to fix it later.. fix it now, people will respect your honesty and forgive.. fix it later and you look like goofs.
I have been using AMD since I started in 2006, I have blogged many times about your products, and all this passionate writing comes not from a position of opposition but from one of your own fans.
[Here is a lighthearted look at 'End Of Life' known also as EOL, when a product moves from the support phase to a coffin somewhere in the ethernets of a Skyrim graveyard.. or no longer supported by the manufacturing company, while this is not always the worst thing ever to have happened in existence.. try paying £4000-12000 for a MacPro and tell me in 6-10 years if you feel like a little cry :'(
Now please listen to the hitchhiker's guide music, and have a reasonably astute voice in you head, for the duration of the proceedings. ~ahthankyou]
Once upon a time in the 1970's of 'earth' The Planetial Conglomeration Interstellarfractuation, also known to the locals as IBM, realized once consumers worked out that the original company that sold them their 'Till device', was then responsible to help them use it for a unlimited number of years, they became aware & alarmed this was going to be all too costly.. negating the disastrous PR problems that occurred with a Till that tallied the wrong outcome this would come second and third place.. oh my!
By the 1980's every major company had just assumed the humans were stupid and would accept; 'when a new model comes out we stop supporting the old one' and many stupid humans did, even though they paid the same price for a system as you would for a kidney on the black market, they just said 'okay' and bought the new model.
Two companies did not think they should be so mean to the stupid humans.. IBM and Apple, in the early 80's it was IBM offering extended support, and in the mid-80s to 1990's it was Apple giving up to 6 years EOL support, today Apple offers 6 years half-life support, with a full life of 10.
One may note another.. Clive Sinclair, whose systems he made sure were backward compatible.. possibly the first human to do this on a whole range of computers, and so risk losing money.
By 1995 the idea you had support what-ever-on-earth you were selling had caught on, and people would get quite cross ..if you sold them junk and disappeared to china they would report you to Interpol because they would have nerd-rage if something didn't work *exactly* as stated!
By 2000's graphic chip vendors, became proud of their place within the community, offering much laxed policies on RMA and EOL, even cards from those eras still receive support today.
*
Don't let the talking whale delude you, all of this was hard fought, with many angry letters about amps and millivolts .. usb ports with strange colors that no one knew what they meant.
In history there has been many strange occurrences of faulty goods, like the hypnotic vacuum cleaner incident of 2070, where as you know, many people where convinced that cleaner was working but in-fact it had no motor and only a MP3 player and a speaker... or the woeful tale in 2102 of the faulty electric massage underwear, .. so many lives lost, they will be missed.
People enjoy knowing who to trust.. now if you just pop in the scales and I'll warm up the probe..
.. ohw you *have* lost weight, must be all the seaweed we feed you. .. its vibrating .. oh! i think that means its ready..
notes----
*Shixxor of Reddit's Flying Whale. great artist!
These days we all have smartphones.. like a satellite device for our PC's.. a mini part of our computing life 'on the go'.. there is talk of smartwatches that satellite our phones, while this *has* happened it's yet to catch on.. I think this a great idea!
It would give us a second smaller screen for our phones, linked via bluetooth, we can check our notifications just by turning our wrist, naturally, and we can have traditional wired headphone headsets running up our sleeve, to saving us from the often strange looking mono electricity using bluetooth headsets, we can store & sync more data and have a place to exchange data on our person, when we run out on the move. We wouldn't have to reach to our pocket to take our phone out, which is handy for both security reasons and a more elegant solution.
This would facilitate phablets a bit more, for mobile movie watching too, as most other small tasks would/will be shown on the smartwatch, answering & ending calls, viewing text and fb messages.. although replying requires the phone, we can be patient until we are seated, or have hot-presets like 'ok' 'yes' 'no' 'thanks' 'yes please' 'no thanks' and user defined ones via the our phones. A camera on the side of the watch for easy skype, making it easier to play cameraman.
tbh I really don't like Tablets, I know its a matter of taste, but I don't see the point in them other than for the lady in your life. large and cumbersome, without the nice little luxuries of a laptop, i'd rather keep that to the foray of the phone.. but i could be wrong, as many seem to be making the move to combine laptop and tablet as one device..but i'm still not convinced.
But there seems to be a major fault in the pricing, afterall this is a *watch* we are talking about.. many many if not all, seem wildly overpriced even prohibiting the market into being a grown market and a established technology. Many charge from £300 to £5/600 which is ridiculous! again, you do realize this is a WATCH .. many pay around £30 to £150 for their watches.. so starting at £75 for a basic Android Samsung/HTC/Sony then having a top wall of £150 makes this an *actual* possibility of buying one and becoming a market. I think they got greedy or had starry eyed expectations as far as pricing, but its new tech and no one knows what price it should be at first, but I think we can all see now it's been out for two years.
