DLSS 3.5 Details, PresentMon + Arc Updates, Razer Keyboard & More | The Full Nerd ep. 268
Oh! Oh! Hey. Oh. Oh, not. Ah! We live. Ah, We live our lives. Hello? Hello.
I was looking for the internet. There you are. Oh, welcome. Come on in. You want to stay there? Okay. You know what? Stay over there. Let's go. Uh, welcome. We're here. We're here to talk. We're here to chat.
Chat? We got. We got some cool kids on the. On the line. Beards everywhere. Yeah, there's beards everywhere. Have you ever done a full beard? Mike, I have my.
The sides are too patchy. It really doesn't look good. This is as much as I can do. I mean, that's a solid, solid goatee, though. That's a good.
That's the same reason I shave my head. So I fully understand. Well, welcome.
Let me bring up the chat. Make sure I can see it up there where you know what? I need to meet my laptop. Great. Are you watching us live right now? There we go. I'm watching us live. Cool.
Quick food chat, food, chat, diving right in. So I want to ask you guys. So I took Diana to the airport yesterday. And then on the way, we. We picked up some McDonald's. Right. And so I heard her.
And once we got the food, I heard a go. I was like, Let's gone. Did you buy your tea? Did you bite your lip? I was like, no, no, no, no, no. I as I haven't had McDonald's fries in so long. I mean, we're talking like maybe about four or five years of McDonald's fries.
Like, do you guys have like a favorite fast food fries that you guys like, really enjoy bread? I think you probably have a good ranking. McDonald's are definitely right up there. They topped the charts, obviously for years for many reasons. But personally, I was fine with the in and out messy fries or animal style fries in the column.
I would probably eat those over McDonald's. But for me personally, chick boy, waffle fries are the goat. Ooh. Oh, yeah.
Waffle, for instance, are pretty good. Yeah. The Chick fil A waffle fries is typically I think the waffle fries are pretty solid.
But for me, it's got to be the Wingstop fries. They've got various flavorings, man. I don't I don't know if I've had Wingstop fries I have never had. Cause there's always just wings for me. Yeah, yeah. I mean, they're. They're just covered in salt and tons and tons of seasoning. That's all there is to it.
Oh, it's the same reason there were five guys as well. Let's get five guys in the conversation. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. All the. All these fries sound really good, except for McDonald's. I, I rank McDonald's phrases like lowest of the low personally of all the the fast food chains that.
Jimmy, have you. Have you eaten the fries from Burger King of your fries? A burger? Well, it depends on the Burger King because I don't know about where you live, but here in Oakland, it can it very, very, very, very is where you go. The place that's close to me is like hookah, you know, when Quite inconsistent. Very inconsistent. I feel like when Burger King fries are are good that they're like the top of the of the major chains you know which are Wendy's McDonald's Burger King you know like major chains of the sub chains and I well now I get to try Wingstop I know but yeah that's this one sort of in between where we live. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, I should, I should try that. Waffle fries What's your top ranking for the, for the, for the big chains I put, I put Burger King. Okay so. Oh God. When it, when it's, when it's good.
When it's good. I don't think I've ever been to Burger King and be like, Man, these are good fries. And I like, oh, I notice it because I really like the Whopper burgers, but the fries are always a low point. Interesting. Interesting. Oh, we got people the here's here's the Go ahead. I got people in the Arby's fries are Wendy's fries are really good.
Well, this is pretty good for fries. So I have a funny story. My very first job was a Wendy's, and I was I was put on the fry machine, you know, as as you do when he when he started, I think it was like 15 fresh face. And I was just like, ooh, I got my first job.
That's, you know, and, and so I was on the fry station. My, my, my goal was to just fry up what I needed to bag up what I needed to and provide it right? So I think it was like the second shift or maybe the third shift. I it was an order for the chicken strips and I put the chicken strips in the basket, but I accidently like, I think I kind of like, I don't know, I don't remember how I did it, but I dropped one of the chicken strips in the main part of the fryer and I was like, Oh, no big deal.
I'll just pick it up. I dip my hand, you know, in the oil to get it out. And I was like, Huh, I don't feel right. Oh, no.
And the manager, really nice lady. She was she was hilarious. You know, luckily we had just put in brand new oil and it was like early in the day. So, like, the oil wasn't the hottest that it's going to be. But yeah, who? I averted disaster real bad. I was idiot. Yeah. Oh, man.
But curly fries. Yeah. Arby's curly fries. Okay, now, now that I think about that, dang, that's probably number one of the major chains for me. I always forget about Arby's because I don't really go there anymore. But I will have the change because, man, Burger King type fries is.
Here's a fat man Pro-tip I hate Burger King fries, but as a fat man I like fries. So what I do when I go to Burger King is I get the Whopper because that's my favorite burger of any of the major fast food brands. But I just get the standalone whopper then. So instead of ordering fries, I just order side of chicken fries with it. Just, you know, just stab a dagger straight into my arteries and have a delightful time there. You know, a whopper and chicken fries.
That is a big lunch for anybody. Yeah, Yeah. My, my, my wife likes putting the fries on the burger. That's. That's her.
That's her tip. I'm not I'm not a big fan of. But anyway, anyway, we have a $2 super chip from, uh, who's a Bobby 0081. Thank you for the $2. I appreciate it. So where's Gordon? Unfortunately, Gordon couldn't come to the show again, so I'm. I'm filling in for his first show.
I'm keeping his chair really warm so that hopefully when he comes back, he's going to be like, Oh, my God, why is this chair so warm? And I'm going to be like, You don't want to know. You don't want to know. So immediately start slandering MacDonald. I know he's going to be like, What did you say about McDonald's? So yes, and we got people in the chat already hungry. Already hungry.
I think we should just we should we should just start. We've got we got fun stuff to talk about. I think we should just get into it.
So let's talk about some chips. Yeah, let's talk about some chips. Uh, go ahead, Adam. Whenever you're ready. Dang it.
Okay, I forgot something, but whatever we'll talk about later. Uh oh. You know what? I actually scripted this out like Gordon would do, but I didn't put that last part. Uh,
okay, here we go. In this episode of the full nerd Deals gets more smarter. Intel provides some interesting updates, and Razr throws their hat into the custom keyboard ring. You? I said, Welcome to episode Crap. I didn't look at the number 268 of the full nerd.
I am your fill in host for this episode. Adam Patrick Murray. I have to find gentlemen on the line here. The first one I'm going to refer to is bread, turkeys.
Hello Internet. The second one I'm going to refer to is Michael Krater. Back after it's been a couple months out here.
And your title, Rick quick remind me, is just Stephanie. I am a lowly staff writer. Lowly staff writer. No, no.
You're the highest of the staff writers in my heart. That's not true. You're all equal and then controlling the vertical and horizontal is will the sly. Hello. Hello, everyone. Happy Tuesday.
Happy Tuesday. We were talking about fries earlier in the pre-show and yeah, now, now I feel like there's not really a place to get fries around here, huh? Not really. In downtown San Francisco, there's not too many restaurant chains.
Actually, there is this restaurant chain. I was talking with one of my my friends who's vegan. Have you heard of MC Charlie? MC Charlie's? No, no.
So look up MC Charlie's. There's one in LA and one in San Francisco. I don't know if there's more than that, but it's essentially an all vegan McDonald's rip off. So it literally looks like McDonald's inside, got the red, got the arches and things like that. But it's all vegan. Yeah.
So, yeah, I think that might be the closest place we should know. We should take more in there one of these days. No, no, I want to stay on it. I don't even think he would step foot in it. I mean, he knows his order.
Coffee? Yeah, of course. And it has going to be like, what is this? Is this coffee vegan as well? Like, it will have coffees. All right, well, unless you put creamer anyway. Anyway, we're here to talk about the PC before we dive into the fun topics that we have, including DL, assess 3.5
Intel ARC updates and present on updates and Razer showing off a new custom keyboard which might create a review. That's why he's joining us. A couple of quick updates before we hop in. There has been more information around the whole LTE LTE scenario and we we covered it a lot on the show last week. It's funny, we're looking at the timestamps and we kind of we kind of breezed through the the main topics to get to the Q&A.
And the first question was about the LCD stuff. The poll has done some great follow up stuff there. You know, Linus has come out and given some some statements and they're currently on a production pause. So there's more information. We don't need to get in all to it and get all all into it here. But there's a couple things I want to say.
The the one of the major updates kind of around this is is around an ex-employee named Madison. It's very, very serious allegations that I think hopefully can be looked into and addressed because of all this stuff. That's definitely the stuff for me personally that doesn't sit right and hopefully they can address that and figure out what's going on, because that's, you know, for for a workplace to have a toxic culture. And I'm not saying that I know anything about the situation, but the allegations are that it has a toxic culture to it and definitely something that needs to be addressed. The other part is I realize, you know, in the middle of talking about it yesterday or last week, I was very Kumbaya and, you know, talking about how we approach things.
And I didn't want to come across as, oh, hey, look it, we got all our stuff figured out. That is not hopefully not the vibe they were putting out. But I want to say that, yeah, Now in giving kind of the behind the scenes of how we do things or offering suggestions and helps to anybody who is struggling with that stuff, you know, please feel free to reach out. It's not that we know how to do this and we're the best at it. It's just I feel like it's it's something I wanted to say, just at least to get out there. So just another perspective.
If you're going around looking for more coverage of this. I just saw Ian Cutler's, you know, for going on the show for Women in Tech put out an hour and a half video diving deep into it last night. I haven't had a chance to watch it yet, but I'm curious to see what he has to say.
So I just think it will their listeners might as well. So I just share that. Yeah, for sure. I think we might be seeing Ian sometime soon, so hopefully, hopefully we get to chat with a more about that.
Um, yeah. Anyway, one wanted to touch on that before we get in and then yeah, I think, I think we should dive in the with the topic of NVIDIA and deal with SAS 3.53.5 To me, Brad signifies that it's a point update that this isn't a major revision to the way deal. So 3.30 3.0 works would you would you consider that true? Brett Uh, I'm not necessarily. I think 3.5 signifies that it is a pretty serious update,
but not one that they want to say, Hey, this is the next generation of deals. S So and that's honestly my impression. I haven't, I haven't had a chance to actually play with it hands on myself yet.
But from everything I saw on the presentation, talking with the folks in video, that's kind of my impression of that as well. So there is one major thing in which is kind of the differentiating factor for this point. Five update in this that A.I. powered ray reconstruction. Yes, correct. It's slide 23, if you want to show that.
Willis, this is this is a lot of this is over my head. I'm not a developer at all. Brad Hopefully you can you can help help the common person understand what the hell this means.
So basically, when this all deals deals as 3.5 and its flagship feature, Ray Reconstruction is all focused 100% around making Ray traced visuals look better in games just to be straight up front, you might see a small performance boost in some games, but that's not the goal. The goal is to make Ray tracing look better. Mm hmm. Hmm. So basically, when a game is Ray traced, that happens by sending tens, hundreds, thousands of little bits of Ray's into a scene, getting all those light sample data, doing all its complex GPU things and figuring out how to present it. But the reason it took Ray tracing so long to be usable in games is because doing that task is extremely, you know, intensive.
It like will meld GPUs that you just have infinite rays of light. The reason that movies look so good is because they can take hours or days to run that process. But games have to respond to in real time. So it's limited to the number of rays it can cast.
And because of that, when you get a raw ray trace picture, it can look a little grainy When Ray tracing the DNA test first came out back, you know, previous examples before that, because there were some ray trace games before that, you could go back and look and see that there's a graininess to the picture. So the way that you counteract that is by running a task called a deep noise. And it basically checks either temporarily.
So over a couple of frames does this magic figures out, hey, this is kind of what it's supposed to look in, fills in the blanks where all the rays are missing from, or you can do it spatially, which is, hey, you know, this is one frame, but these group of pixels here is next to this group of pixels here. Here's kind of what it should look like. Fill in the blanks. As you can tell, anyone who saw the ray tracing, actually, sorry. I'm sorry.
2121 Slide 21 Ray tracing looks pretty good as anyone who's played ray games could tell. You know, sometimes it's not worth the performance impact, but when Ray tracing kicks, but it really kicks by like cyberpunk overdrive mode is awesome. Control was awesome. Minecraft all those, but they all have to run this noise thing. So what Ray deal says 3.5 Ray reconstruction does
is basically replaces the hand to the noisier algorithms that game developers currently use in their games to clean up those Ray traced images to put its A.I. to work. He does all that stuff much more efficiently, trained on much more data in addition to the basic temporal and spatial d noise in thing, it's specifically looking for Ray traced visual effects, so it's smart enough to know, Hey, this is supposed to be ray tracing. Let's pay more attention to this is trained on a lot more data and also takes in game data like what the actual simple colors on the screen are. And you know what? What is actually on the screen? It's not just the raw d noise in that traditional ginormous band.
And so what that does is it provides much more accurate. Ray traced visuals per Nvidia's claims. Again, I haven't had a chance to try it hands on yet, but I have noticed there have been times in video mentioned this in their presentation.
I can totally attest that I've seen this like sometimes when you're when you see ghost in in a in a game, especially that fast action fast action that's typically because of the way the noise in works with the ghosts. Because you got to remember that the way we deal with this works is it starts with the low resolution images and then it uses A.I. magic to upscale it to fit your screen.
So if those low resolution recast images are grainy and that in noise there's are missing little bits of it when they use when DFACS uses that information to blow it up to your screen, you tend to lose some accuracy. You lose some vividness. This goes in. It looks to the pixel that. So you can see, for example, less coasting. They say you'll be able to see much more clearly, like car headlights are coming out of the headlights and not just like an amorphous blob coming out of it. So and so forth, stuff like that.
Much more accurate reflections. They say Reflections is one of the worst ones in water puddles and whatnot on mirrors, just because of, you know, all the complexities involved. But with Ray reconstruction, you can see much more clarity like they shared a cyberpunk phantom liberty example that had the reflection. Actually, you could read the letters from the building across the street in the reflection, whereas with traditional techniques you could not. So if you play ray tracing games, it seems like a really, really cool step forward. Uh, again, the proof is in the pudding.
I haven't had a chance to test it myself yet, but on paper it looks pretty darn cool. And you know, Nvidia clearly putting a lot of time and effort into Ray traced and DNA DLC. And I think the fact that they gave it a 0.5 update actually signifies I think this is a fairly big deal. Okay but so the that was long winded that was you said do it do it as a simple explanation. It's hard to get much more simpler than that. This is a really official looking.
I think it was right. I do want to hear Mike's take on it because I'm curious. But I think for me, I really I'm not I'm not going to say I'm an expert in it, but at least in the terms of video and photography, the noises are we use the noise, there's plenty. So like the same thing kind of applies except for you doing it in a more infinite scale because you're having to do it in real time.
So I can only imagine. But I mean, the the, the examples that they showed of the, the limitations of hand tuned to noises and things like that, I'm like, okay, you know, actually this is the same kind of thing that applies to to video and photography. So and not necessarily the motion thing always, but at least the Yeah, the wave reflections handle and you know, it's like, okay, it can kind of muddy an image or make it less, less vivid. Right? The colors can kind of get desaturated when, when you apply a lot of dino to it. So if, if Raytracing inherently has more noise in it and they need to do that to noise or to it, this sounds like a better option.
I think the bigger question I have for me is, is this something that somebody is going to be able to check in a settings menu in a game? Or is this just something that gets implemented by a developer and we reap the benefits of it? Deal us s is always implemented by the developer. Well, I mean, I mean specifically the Ray reconstruction part of it. I didn't ask the specific question. I'm not sure. I think that if 3.5 is supported, it'll just be supported
A good thing is it will be unlike dialysis three which adds the air frames Deal says 3.5 is supported by all RTX GPUs. Yeah. So I think that if a game supports RTX three point deals as 3.5, there'd be no reason not to just have it work if it's supported. So I would guess that if it's supported by the game, it'll just be on.
Yeah. If you want to show Slide 31, which I thought was interesting too, because they kind of break down the chart of the different deal, assess versions in which GPUs are supported on it. We're starting to get a little bit in that territory of like, okay, wait, so only certain features are on specific cards, but then this new ray reconstruction is 3.5, but it's available on our old RTX GPUs. Uh, so it's complicated.
It's complicated. The easy way to think about it is you need RTX 30 series for a frame gen, and that is a targetable option. Everything else should just work on all RTX GPUs. Okay. Yeah, that's why I was just if you want to pull it, the the whole idea of is this something that the user can pick obviously frame generation is a check mark you can turn on or off. I mean all ray tracing is usually a check mark to say if you want it or not, because I know there's people in the chat who are probably not big fans of Ray tracing to begin with.
But I do wonder if like, okay, is the Ray reconstruction, would there ever be a situation where you actually wanted to use the traditional Dino is or maybe a performance thing? It's like, Hey, Ray, Reconstruction does have a little bit of performance overhead, and if you're on an older GPU, maybe you don't want to use that one. That's why I was curious about the implementation. Did did they talk at all about performance, uh, impacts? They did. They said you may see a small performance uplift in 3.5 games. Pardon me, but it will totally depend on the game. This is not targeting performance whatsoever.
It's pure visual quality. The reason you might see a performance uplift in some games they specifically mentioned Cyberpunk 2077 is because that game has so many ray tracing effects it already uses possibly several different kinds of noise or technologies like it might use the spatial and temporal one. It might they might have different noises running it, that's all. Can replaced by this one deal. Assess 3.5 ray reconstruction process.
So you might get five or ten frames more per second, you know, a negligible kind of uplift at the rates that you're running. But you shouldn't go into this looking for faster performance, just better visuals. Okay. I mean, which is not a bad thing.
I mean, I personally like ray tracing and the bells and whistles that provides Mike Crater. What's what's your what's your personal opinion on on ray tracing usually I keep ray tracing turned off even on single player games. I'm the kind of guy who just likes as much resolution and as accurate resolution as I can get on my big giant monitor and my and my computer is not powerful enough to do full ray tracing 60 frames per second across 3000 pixels. I think in theory it might have a bit of a communications issue here because between the parts of deal versus 3.0
and then jumping to 3.5 that are available on this CPU and not this GPU are starting to get really jumbled. For me personally, I've seen I mean, like I turn on dialysis and it is a dramatic improvement just in terms of performance, but like this thing over here will not work on my 3070, but this thing will, even though it's a higher number than what it was before, it's making my head spin.
So I don't know what to turn on and what to look for and whatnot. So it would takes like a solid 40 minute dive into these technical explanations just to say, Hey, here's what you need to turn on to make it look good and here's what you need to turn off to make it run fast. That sounds like a good a good article we could write up there. You are always thinking like the writer.
I appreciate that, Mike. Okay, well, when. I'm sorry. Maybe you already started this, but it probably went through my ears. When can we start seeing the fruits of this deal? This is 3.5. It will be in Phantom Liberty when the cyberpunk expansion comes out.
September. I believe it is. Yeah, the end of September. September's a packed month. It will be an Alan Week two, which comes out in October. It will also be worked into the portal RTX remake, which is getting updated this fall.
With that with that already already is a showcase basically for RTX Technologies even has the RTX IO storage stuff and then more to come. Hmm. Well, speaking of tentpole stuff, Willis, why don't you go ahead and show slide 11 packed in in this information was announcing Half-Life two RTX that yeah that's what got me pretty excited. This is just a mod project, correct? Well, it's not quite just a mod project like in video work together to work to get forward. Top modding groups have like to team together to start working on this. I forget the name of the studio, but there's a studio name behind this, and that's basically those four top modding groups.
They're starting to work on this. They're hoping to get more people to come help out. That's part of the reason for this announcement. But what they got already going looks pretty dang good. Yeah, like Half-Life two is one of those games that I, I used to play almost yearly because I felt like it just held up and was like, I don't know, it's just a tentpole release for me. So.
But I haven't I can't, I can't remember the last time I played it. I think it was like maybe 2020 was the last time that I, I went through it. So now I'm like, okay, now I definitely have a reason to, to go back into it and play it. I'm I'm pretty excited. We'll see if you ever play that flight to dabbled with it when I was young Yeah well now you got a reason to tap back into it. The VR version? No, unfortunately I have not. I still I still need to do that.
I still kind of wish. It's cool that they're doing all these modding projects, and I love that RTX remix is a bonding driven thing because I'm a big believer in mods and the openness of the PC. I love it. Some of the most popular games today have their inspiration, their roots and mods, but I also really wish, even though it's a proprietary technology, I wish that companies would get on board with this sometimes. If it's not too hard to add the RTX remix as a video keeps claiming because they launched it. Talking about Morrowind and if I could actually play RTX remakes Morrowind, like I would jump into that tomorrow.
And I'm sure there's plenty of folks who would do that with older games too. Yeah, it's super fun too to re rediscover some of those old games in different lights. I mean, I was actually a big fan of the the Minecraft because it was just like it's like, Oh my God, like this is completely different than how Minecraft really looks and it blows my mind. I play Minecraft a lot. I actually just had to yell at my kids before we started doing a full nerd because they were playing Minecraft together and laptops can't get on my internet bandwidth.
But we play hide and seek basically in Minecraft sometimes. Okay, which is always cool. It's always fun, but I think I discussed this when Minecraft RTX came out doing it with the realistic shadows, the lighting and everything, and the full RTX like took it to a whole new level.
So you don't find that incongruous between the super realistic lighting and the fact that everything is a meter sized YouTube? Oh, it's a little weird. It takes a second. I would say that it's cool. That was cool. Like it was. It was like it was unique. I don't know, because it was just like, yeah, you've got this like pixel art.
But then it was like, like actually illuminated correctly and I don't. No idea. I think, I think that it's voxel not pixel. We're very particular about this so I think that that was harder for me to wrap my head around was the fact that with Raytracing on and you can have the like near infinite block scale like I can't remember.
Yeah. Um, speaking of near infinite information, Intel drops. I don't know why it's not near infinite infinite amounts of interesting information. Intel dropped. Um, I guess let's just start off with the the ARC GPU updates.
Um, I think that's worth yeah, I think that's actually the big news, although maybe not necessarily as interesting to the full nerd crowd. Well, the show will, uh, when we go to shows Slide 11 for the intel ones, uh, there's. There's some news. What's.
What's the news that they were sharing last week? Yeah. So basically, as we all know, Intel's debut, our GPUs came out a little under a year ago. They haven't even been out for a year yet.
And they had excellent Raytracing performance, excellent DirectX 12 performance, but they had a lot of bugs, terrible performance and direct ex non DirectX X11. Since then, Intel's been working hard to listen and fix all those and they've done a tremendous job. We have a bunch of articles and videos going back saying, Hey, you know, these aren't buggy anymore. A few months after launch they released a big new driver that re architected the way it handles DirectX nine and we saw massive improvements in games like CSGO and legal legends and whatnot.
You know, the e-sports games that still run on the nine, but DirectX X 11 games are kind of the bread and butter of gaming. Like right now a lot of the triple-A games are switching over to direct XT. Well, most of the major releases your bio be DirectX 12, but most of the games that people play on PC are still DirectX 11 and Intel still was behind the pack there. But last week sat down with Tom Peterson, some other folks from Intel, Tom Peterson's been on the show before and they basically said with this new driver that they just put out DirectX X11, they re architected that driver as well to reduce the other driver overhead and other issues that caused some of the, you know, uneven performance on DirectX X 11 games and seven sorry are just telling will which slide to show off. So they did have some examples of uplift in gains from the, from the launch driver. Yeah.
Which I thought was interesting that there I mean so it's the same with direct because it's the launch driver they have to re-architect it to change stuff I'm sure at a fundamental level, but you got to change a lot of hand-hewn stuff in this stuff. So I'm sure this is the culmination of many months worth of work with them slowly picking away at these games. But they now say that on average DirectX X Games run 19% faster than they did at launch, which is great.
Hey, there's a 20% performance gain as well as 20% smoother. So one of the issues that happened with ARK at launch is that they were just stuttering frame pacing issues. Um, and now they're saying, hey, you know, with all this re architecting that we've done, we managed to fix a lot of that too. They gave us a selection of games to show off some of the, you know, the ranges that you could see. But they said, yeah, in general like 19% faster, 20% more responsive.
We heard you were putting in the work. You know, these games you run better on out now. I mean honestly, the looking at the the games that they showed in this in this chart, I mean these are some of the the biggest games that I can think of that are heavily played. I mean, league legends, Genshin impact Apex Legends Counter-Strike to Dota to GTA online obviously. So yeah, I mean these are these are important games to really highlight and say, Hey, you know what? We made some, some maximum important performance improvements, which is, I mean good on them for continuing to develop and work more on the driver stuff.
I'm hoping I'm hoping to once Gamescom dies down and I will get my house set back together to retest the ARC A70 versus the RTX 6600 because right now on our best graphics cards and we've also done follow up videos for this, we said, Hey, you know, ARC is doing a lot better, but it, you know, still is a little bit behind on DirectX 11 and games just run more reliably on the radio and 6600 and I'm really curious to see if that's still the case. So right now in our best GPUs, we have it split as best budget is the Radio 6600, but best budget, if you want to retrace is the arc 750 and I'm curious to see if that also applies after all these updates because Intel's been working real hard on this. Yeah.
Another thing they talked about, which I thought was interesting was the performance improvements depending on the CPU that you paired it with. They had this one slider, the Slide 13 Willis where the uplift was higher on this i5 13 400 F versus the 13 900 K, which I'm going to assume is because they were able to get with the higher end CPU, you're able to kind of just push through some of those driver overhead issues, correct? Yep. Yep. This is kind of building off. I don't know if anyone remembers. Earlier this summer, Intel released this big campaign around, Hey, we did tons of testing to figure out what class of CPU is best to match with what class of CPU, and in their findings, they tested Nvidia, AMD and Intel. They didn't just test the intel arc and they said in their findings, you know, the super powerful GPU should be matched with the core I9 or RYZEN and but for these affordable level ones, the best, you know, sweet spot for actually getting the most performance out of it without spending ridiculous amounts of money is core i5 or ryzen five. So
yes, if you're using that kind of balance system like they recommend, that's where you get this 19% faster average in 1080 games and direct X11. If you switch to direct, if you switch to a core I9, it drops to 12% and that is because the core I9 can affect just bulldoze over some of the initial issues you know in all. And just to be clear, all the charts that we showed beforehand were with that that core i5 not the core I9 So correct.
Yeah. Right. So which I people might take issue with that because that's not really the way we test cheap use per say in a vacuum, like we test with high end rigs to eliminate bottlenecks. But I genuinely believe that matching a core I5 with things like this is perfect and I think this is a perfectly valid way to break this down. And they were not hiding this fact whatsoever. They're like, Yeah, it'll be less on a core I9 but if you're running a $250 graphics card with the core I9, what are you doing other than making av1 encoding or whatever? You know, I'm sure I'm sure people are using it out there that I'm sure.
So you'll still see an uplift if you're doing that, but not as pronounced. Yeah, in the last time. So the last time Keith did a check in was at the six month mark. We've talked about various check ins when it's worth it because at some point checking in monthly just became like, okay, yeah, the either the improvements weren't necessarily anything to write home about or it was just I mean that's one dedicated video just to testing one dedicated piece of hardware.
So we kind of put it, by the way. So but yeah, maybe we'll do a one year check in or something like that. It's crazy to think that it's it's almost a year or maybe even just the direct X9 update, like, Hey, is it really better that much better on direct x 11 now? Yeah, yeah. Something to check out. Something else to check out is presentation and I will be honest before before Intel provided this information.
I did not think that Intel was kind of the the brain brainpower behind present mind which just so you know is is a tool people use to kind of look at analytics it present is is what frame view and videos frame views is built on Caffrey free mics is built on present on bread AMD's OC MSA afterburner. Any of these monitoring tools uses presentation which a lot of people assume is just part of Windows, but it's actually an open source project from Intel. Yeah.
So in the next time somebody says that the Jared Walton is a shill for running frame view on AMD cards, then you need to correct yourself and say, actually he's an intel shill. Frame view runs wonderfully on this. So. So, okay, so presentation has has an update, a very important update. Well, I guess a couple updates, but there's there's an important one to talk about here, which is GPU busy.
Yeah. And this is the other aspect, like tying the two halves of the story together. So Intel put a lot of work into reorienting these drivers to eliminating driver overhead to just making them run better. With DirectX 11 and they didn't say this explicitly, but they're like, how do we show people actually what we've done? Like how can we drive across the point that, you know, how we're what actually tangibly have we done? And so they introduced a new metric called GPU bizzy, which basically lets you know how much of a the GPU is actively busy for. So they showed a really illuminating example where they had the overlay of the actual frame times in a game. So though your frame times are the faster your frames refreshing, the more responsive it is.
If you have a wild frame time chart, that's when you get the stuttering that you feel, which is in the example. Sorry, real quick in a slide 17, the yellow is the GPU busy, the blue is the frame time. Yeah, I don't have that slide up right now. It's at the lunch driver. Yes, yes.
So the doing the launch driver as you can see, the yellow one is the GPU busy is a relatively consistent 5 milliseconds which is you know, that's great for especially for a competitive game like that, but the actual frame times you were getting were spiking all over the place which and as layman, real quick as a layman, I would have been like, wait, isn't isn't the GPU always working? Like, why? What, what else is going on that the GPU isn't doing? Well, the GPU has to wait for the CPU to process all of its data. It could be because the GPU you can only draw with a CPU tells it to do and part of this really shows how they've eliminated overhead because if you flip to the next one, the new driver that has GPU busy 22. Slide 22 you will see that now with the re-architect the drivers, the frame times closely match that five millisecond GPU busy time. That's because they eliminate a lot of that driver overhead, optimize the CPU performance that was happening because in addition to all the normal game stuff, the basically Intel's drivers act like a translator for high level DirectX X instructions. So Microsoft Windows, the game gets written for direct X and says, Hey, do this and direct X Intel hardware and video hardware and the hardware all have their own instructions that they then translate that into that hardware instructions for the GPU to be able to output it, what the CPU is telling it. So but it has to go through that translation layer.
That's where a lot of this driver overhead stuff is showing up. That's what they're kind of trying to show here. So it's really interesting on that front.
So you can see like, yeah, they actually have done a lot of work. You can tell from Overwatch right here that things are running a lot better than they had before. But it's also really interesting because you can kind of get a gross feel for whether game is CPU or GPU limited. Just looking at utilization in traditional performance monitoring tools. But if you look at this, now that we have the GPU busy metric to use, in addition with the standard frame times, you can really get in close look and say, hey, you know, it is my view that's, you know, the bottleneck here. If this is closely tracked like it is now in overwatch, if you upgrade your GPU, you'll probably get faster frames because it's, you know, basically spitting out frames as fast as the GPU is spitting out.
But if you're still seeing those crazy frame, try frame time jumps while the GPU busy is faster than that, then that indicates that there's either a game issue, possibly a driver issue, or more likely, you could say, hey, you know, in this scene you can really see it's getting CPU bottleneck real bad. Hmm. So you'll hear people often talk about, hey, you know, my graphics card runs great, except for these three scenes in this one game, it really chokes. Then you could pull this up and you could actually be like, Yeah, it is my CPU.
Not quite keeping up. We have a way to look at that now, which is deeply fascinating to me as a reviewer, right? Well, so which brings me to another note. I mean, this this is information is interesting information for a reviewer, but also this is information that anybody can use to be like, okay, where is the bottleneck in my system? So it's going to be showing up in present on the new presenter on overlay. If you want to show a slide 28. But is this information going to be able to be viewable if you're like, Hey, you know what I really like using frame view or free mics is it going to show up there as well? I think Prime X already said he is working in CPU busy and not AMD.
Intel doesn't plan restricting any of this information. It's still all open source. This is going to be open source just as much. This is just the first time that Intel is giving GPU nerds the ability to tap into present line directly, giving it an overlay, doing all that rather than just supplying the APIs or whatever that you all the other developers use.
So you can view it in present month beta, which I believe is live now. I think it launched last Friday. Perhaps I took a long weekend.
So the days before and a cool thing about that is they have a deeply configurable overlay function so that you can have it run multiple graphs, metrics on one graph so you can configure it. So it shows both frame times and you busy in addition to all the other things that you would expect out of a program like this, like memory usage, voltage, stuff like that logging ability, it logs it, everything that you would want initially it has and they're still going to be working on it like that. You can spit out the CSP files if you're the kind of person who tracks the stuff that use the CSP files to spit out graphs, you can have it.
So it just presents the raw data on screen. You can have it sort of presents and graphs. You can see the differences in real time. It actually looks like a super cool, super versatile tool, but they set it up that way specifically to show this GPU busy thing, which I am glad they did because this is really useful.
Yeah, I will admit I'm one of those people who has a hard time breaking the habit of always having some sort of metric overlay when it when I'm gaming. Mike, are you like that? Are you in this, this horrible camp? Oh, I pretty much just look at frames per second and then try and hit that 120 on my monitor and that's about it. But Brett, I did want to talk to you about this specific advantage that Intel is getting with their new drivers. You were talking about how with the translation specifically, they've got a very small and presumably small edge over an AMD or an AMD video card with this GPU. Amazing, this frame time stuff.
They're showing it with Intel CPUs. Of course. Do you get that same advantage, that same improvement in smoothness? If you're using an AMD, ECP remains to be tested, I would think. I would think that you would in its present morn is truly agnostic and always has been like it just straight shows you the data. I would think that typically say a ryzen five and a core i5 are roughly the same level. Some things are better.
So if you see I would expect to see similar performance for similar level of CPU's in games, but it will depend product and product to game the game. I don't think they're nursing anything to make it rain worse on Andy or. Yeah. Well yeah. I mean the the hardware should all match up and make that run smoothly. And I'm asking specifically because AMD processors are getting so much attention for game performance with their 3D series, it's just insane.
Yeah, I would love to play around with Frame view and GPU frame view. I'm so used to frame view. We had to mention frame you earlier present Mon Veda and one of those questions I would love to. There's a lot of cool stuff you could do with this actually. Like we I wouldn't be surprised to see a bunch of really rad videos on YouTube and different testing articles around soon because this is actually super interesting and I think it could provide a lot of good data for people in publications like us that want to know and be able to quantify.
Now, hey, if you have, you know, a $250 graphics card like don't spend more than 250 or $300 on a CPU because you can see the way that they behave together. That's the reason that you wouldn't pay recourse right now. And with in our case, I'm 50 and that's why the performance leap was so much less when they showed how the core I9 did versus the core I5. So it's just really interesting nerdy stuff.
Do you, do you, do you feel like you're going to start using it more for your GP testing or currently I use in-game benchmarks with frame view. I do okay sometimes, but usually I do frame view. I like this a lot. I haven't had too much chance to play with it yet because I don't have my test system set up yet, but I plan on playing with it very much soon and I think there's a very good chance that, yeah, fundamentally I am. I am really excited about what this looks like. Actually, it's a it's in beta like, like you mentioned, it's out.
Anybody can go download this. I did ask on the presentation like what? Why is it marked as a beta? Like what? What kind of things are holding it back? Is it going to negatively or. I was trying to infer is it also going to negatively impact performance just because it's a beta? Did they talk about performance? No, I wouldn't worry about it too much other than the usual. They call it the observer effect. Like it. You are reading something that looks at this. It will put a slight difference in, but nothing that should be measurable.
But if you're getting like down to nitty gritty, like it might add a millisecond or, you know, just something like that. But I since this runs off present, ma'am, this is basically just a wrapper for presentation which again is already used by frame view from okay, cat from everything from Fraps to afterburner. I would expect this to run just as smoothly as those do, especially with intel behind it. Okay. Yeah.
Nice and cool. And like I said. Yeah. Cat premix, I believe on Twitter already said they're working on he is working on implementing CPU busy into it. So Intel is just making this really available just like they did the original present months and hopefully we start seeing this pop up in more of these monitoring tools soon because I think it could be very spectacularly helpful for figuring out what part of your PCV you should upgrade. If you if you want to go watch Tom chat with Steve over Game Nexus, they did a nice little chat talking about this stuff and getting even deeper into the tool, the whole architecture stuff.
It's it's definitely over my head. But it was I like having more tools at my disposal. At my disposal.
So that's a that's pretty cool. Think about it. Think about how often we get asked on the show very game specific questions. Hey man, I'm running Arma, I have X, Y, and Z, processor X, Y, and z GPU. What should I upgrade? Hey, I'm ready into all these different games.
And now we can say we can give you some general, but go fire up presentation. Just put the graph on your screen and see what it tells you over the hour so that you play. I think there's a lot of value at that. Probably too nerdy for the general audience, but for nerds like us, like I think it's. Yeah.
Oh yeah. Well, stepping back in the general audience, I think it's worth highlighting like a year ago when they were introducing these discrete GPUs, everybody as thrilled as we all were to see somebody to step into the GPU, the discrete GPU duopoly, everyone was still treating Intel very much as an unknown quantity, which it was. I mean, I think it took them a long, long time to get this stuff out. There was obviously some behind the scenes delays and the people were wondering, Hey, is Intel in this for the long haul? Will we even see a second generation, which I think was kind of a silly question. This is billions of dollars invested. Intel has proven that they're in this for the long haul.
They're doing consistent updates all the time. And obviously, a lot of this is aimed in a very, you know, press forward area to prove it. But they are proving it if the proof is in the pudding, hey, this is the pudding and the value that they're doing in these midrange to low end discrete cards is astonishing. I can't wait to see what they do with the second generation. Hopefully stepping up into that like RTX 40, 70, 7770 800 area and I am so excited to see what they do when they compete at that level, especially when it comes to value, because that's where a lot of people are kind of hurting at the moment.
Yeah, I dig it, dig it, keep it coming in the well, we'll have to keep testing. It sounds like you have some testing playing though. A little chat with Keith about trying to do some testing, but go play some games. Uh, in our far job. But somebody asked, and I know it's a hard job to play all these damn games. So last major topic for today.
I don't have any fancy Segway, but Razer. Razer has decided to make a custom keyboard that's like the whole idea of custom keyboards that you just. You build it yourself. What the hell, my creator? Of course you can build it yourself. But if you're looking to build this Razer one yourself, well, I mean, you have to buy it from Razer initially.
Okay. Okay. Okay. So, okay, when you step up to a more expensive mechanical keyboard, you got two broad categories you can go into. You can go for. I mean, it's custom in the sense that you can customize it.
And this is like you can start around $100, but it gets into that area at about 150 to 200. You get really, really nice keyboards, full aluminum bodies, hot swap sockets that you can pull out. A lot of them are building in parts of the keyboard that were part of custom builds three or four years ago or these extremely boutique builds like interior foam inside the case to make it sound nicer, gasket mounting, which is a layer of silicone in between the circuit board of the keyboard and the case of the keyboard just to make it feel nice.
There's all sorts of these little touches that people have been doing, and that's the custom side of things. That's the I want a super nice thing to type on. I want it to feel nice, I want it to look nice and then almost completely separated from that.
In the keyboard market, you've got the gamer side of things we want. Super Duper Rugby is we want wired all the time. We want 8000 hertz polling, which is just insane to me.
If you're a human who can tell 8000 different keystrokes in a second, I'm very impressed. But like I said, there's there's up until about six months ago, there was a very hard divide. These Razer's newest keyboard is the Blackwidow V4 75%, which is not a great name, but here it is. They've done a lot of things to bridge the gap between these two categories of the keyboard market. You've got that 75% size, which is, you know, bigger than 60%, which is very hard to get used to, but much, much smaller than a full size or even a tkl. Tenkeyless They have the hot swap socket so you can pull the switches out.
So you can see that's the circuit board run underneath there and throw in anything you want that's compatible with the cherry iMac standard, which is literally hundreds, maybe thousands of different types of switches at this point. They have the interior foam inside the case and in between the circuit board and the other parts of it. They have the gasket mount. They got all this stuff that they've added to it to make it much more like a custom keyboard. And it's it is an impressive change.
It's a big directional change from Razer, who've been very much dedicated to that pure gaming. Even on the Blackwidow V4 Pro, which was the previous design, they're missing a lot of these features. They're missing the gasket Mount, they're missing the hot swaps. And again, that's because that's much more of a very dedicated gamer board, which is why I don't love the name change, because you've got these two different keyboards that are both named Blackwidow V4, but they're very different. It is an impressive change. Another big thing is the switches.
They've done a ton of work on the switches themselves. These are let me see if I can remember this. The Razer V3 orange tactile switches that they've got, you can see this is I don't know if you can see from my camera there. Yeah. You can kind of see they've got this boxy stem that keeps everything very stable as you press down. It's a tactile switch, which is not normally associated with gaming.
But they went in and they looked at the community and they said, hey, this is what people want. We'll put it in there. And it is a huge improvement. If you look at Razer's website, they've got a a page dedicated specifically to their switches and they even have like audio samples of each individual switch and what it sounds like, which is getting way deep into the woods with this custom keyboard stuff. I mean, that's how people can get right. It's it's funny, I've always just kind of peered from from the sidelines and were like, Huh, man, that looks like some cool, fun stuff over there.
But I've never dug in myself. So real quick to to jump back. Mike, are you a custom keyboard guy? Do you built your own? I am. I build my own keyboards. Okay.
So but you've you've reviewed this for the site. You review normal keyboard. So what's the opposite of custom keyboards. What I mean in this vein, this keyboards particular dichotomy, we call it just a gaming keyboard on a regular keyboard. Okay, So and then custom keyboards, there's you can you can go so, so granular into so many different areas.
But just as an example, a more traditionally custom keyboard would be this Keychron Q1 Pro, which has the full super heavy aluminum body. It also has hot swap switches. It's got a much higher profile for typing.
And this is this is more on the side of that custom, not necessarily gaming. It'll work fine for gaming, but it's not really designed for that. And as I said, typically Razer is on the other side of that equation with this keyboard. They're they're really straddling that line.
You've got features on both sides that appeal to a lot of people. Yeah, I'm but this is the first time they've done something like this, correct? It is. It is the very first Razer keyboard with the hot swap function specifically, which is a big deal for a lot of people. Yeah. Mean, I was shocked.
I didn't talk to you much before you went live and I was reading your view and I'm like, Wow, you know, I never expected this out of Razer. Like, it's very different. It's I'm very intrigued by that keyboard.
I mean, they went super deep into the community, just as an example. There's a very popular aftermarket mod that you can do to almost any keyboard. You open it up, you take out the circuit board and you just add duct tape to the back. And it's a very simple tweak that's easy for almost anyone to do.
But a lot of people really like the way that changes the sound and the feel. Razer put that tape on there out of the box. Oh, that's just something that they thought was cool that they added. A Yeah.
You're saying all this and this sounds like a big enough deal. Like why? Why didn't they make this a whole separate new line? Like, I mean, they could have come out with almost like a new line, right? Like, Hey, look, like we have a new custom keyboard line. I, I mean, I didn't talk to them about that specifically, but if I was reading the tea leaves, I'd say that they want to preserve the the popularity of their Blackwidow series. There's some things that they chose very specifically to keep in line with that. For example, one of the things I didn't like in the review is that these have a keycaps instead of PBT, and those are just two different kinds of plastic, not really something that a lot of people care about. But if you're buying a custom keyboard at this level, it's $190, you expect to get PBT keycaps and they were like, No, our blackwidow was I've always use ABC.
We're going to keep that specifically because we like the way it looks with the art should be lighting and you can take their word for that. I think they're shaving a few dollars off of it because they also sell PBT caps, PBT keycaps on top of that for like a $30 upgrade, which is not something I'm in love with. But again, that's another example of how this straddles the line between the custom and the gaming markets.
And so you said it was a 190 U.S. dollars, 190. I think there's a white version that's coming later. It's 200. Okay.
How much how much of a premium over the other? Another relevant blackwidow is that have these custom features? It's actually less expensive than the last blackwidow. I think the blackwidow before Pro, which was their full size 108 key traditional gaming design is to 30 or to 40. So I mean you expect to pay less for a slightly smaller keyboard, but there are so many more features and much more engineering that goes into it and it's still coming in at a lower price, which is impressive. Yeah, Yeah, I'm surprised by that because I don't know, I would, I would think like, okay, they want to get it in the custom keyboard, you know, craziness that's going on out there and, and they're going to use it as a chance to be like, Oh, you know what? We're going to add our features into it here. We're going to take a preexisting line, we're going to make it more customized all, but it's going to come with some sort of price increase. Uh huh.
That's interesting. Well, so, Rick, quick, what was your what was your synopsis of the review then? That should just holistically. Well, I think I just gave it by the way, it's a great key
2023-08-28 09:29
