Minor victory thread
- Thread starter Thread Necromancer
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GasBandit
Staff member
Today has its Silver Lining, however...
[DOUBLEPOST=1476374829,1476374448][/DOUBLEPOST]@PatrThom
I bought a new video card, the one with the best bang for your buck on the market now (other than a ridiculous superbudget card). My current video card is the one at the bottom of this list, the r9 270x. So this one is roughly twice as powerful despite being 20 bucks cheaper. 3 years wasn't a bad run, and really, I could probably continue gaming on my current card at 1080p 60fps just fine if I wasn't now also trying to stream to twitch at the same time while using on-the-fly .264 compression.
I bought a new video card, the one with the best bang for your buck on the market now (other than a ridiculous superbudget card). My current video card is the one at the bottom of this list, the r9 270x. So this one is roughly twice as powerful despite being 20 bucks cheaper. 3 years wasn't a bad run, and really, I could probably continue gaming on my current card at 1080p 60fps just fine if I wasn't now also trying to stream to twitch at the same time while using on-the-fly .264 compression.
At some point I should upgrade from my 6850... Having to run DX:HR at low-res+minimum feels bad.
GasBandit
Staff member
I was, but I didn't know a 1060 was going to be a thing until a week or two ago, and really it's more than I need. The value is just too good.
GasBandit
Staff member
Probably longer... like I said, I still get 60fps at 1080p now with my old card. I don't anticipate going to 4k anytime in the forseeable future.
I figure the 3yr cycle will end not because of FPS, but because of some other feature that gets built into future chips. Onboard H.265/HEVC encode/decode, for instance.
--Patrick
The various manufacturers played around with built in encoders before, but the standards change quickly enough, and the cards can do the work themselves with some GPU programming that their time/silicon is better spent on improving the GPU performance than including specialized features.
Further, hardware encoders are pretty restricted - they have settings, sure, but you can't fine tune the encoding or use a slightly different algorithm based on the content you're encoding. So not only do they become obsolete as standards change, but as existing standards are improved on during encoding steps, they fall behind.
So it's unlikely that you'll see stuff like that. More likely that you'll see more powerful GPUs. As companies use them for specific needs - physics, encoding, decoding - they'll make the individual processing units more capable of handling the specific needs of each use, and on top of that they'll increase their speed, memory bandwidth, and quantity.
It looks like the last generation had no trouble playing 1080p games at 60fps while encoding them real time to h.264 at 24-30 fps, and reports suggest that they could encode video at 3x real time (ie, 1 hour HD video takes 20 minutes). These latest cards should be able to handle this much better, and should enable 4k play and streaming with moderate quality/framerate reduction.
Strangely enough, this is part of the reason I tend to lean slightly more towards the Radeon cards in my personal machine(s). AMD is deliberately making the choice to sacrifice some performance for greater flexibility, which means their cards can handle the fine-tuning of an algorithm rather than relying on faster but fixed-function hardware.
--Patrick
That's interesting, but if they suffer in the gaming market then they aren't as widely used and popular, which will make them less able to spend the money on even better development. Must be an interesting risk/reward balance to play.
They're certainly going all-in in the pro GPU industry.
Putting 1TB of memory* on a video card is certainly new.
--Patrick
*mostly SSD memory, not VRAM.
So I posted this on the page. It took 18 months to reach, and my goal is to crack a thousand by next FCBD.
I saw my doctor tonight and he prescribed me some super strong antihistamines and stuff.
I hope this makes the itching stop. I'm becoming pretty growly.
I hope this makes the itching stop. I'm becoming pretty growly.
Same here.
It was just the annual cost-of-living increase thingie but meh I'll take it.
--Patrick
I've been waiting on an airbag for our car to come in so that Honda could replace it. Our car was part of the Takata Airbag Recall that came out earlier this year. I got the call yesterday, set the appointment for 9am Central this morning (I'm on vacation doing nothing so this was actually perfect) and brought along a couple of things to keep me entertained (book, Kindle Fire Tablet) for a couple of hours and I was set. Got to Honda at 8:55, drove away from Honda at 9:35 with everything done. Yep, 40 minutes and done. Very pleased with how fast they got this done.
Wow, That is surprising. Technicians have to go through a number of procedures to make sure the safety restraint system is safe before working on it, and these take time - not just to do the work, but there are periods of waiting to let electronics completely lose their charge, etc, and things have to be disconnected and reconnected in specific order to avoid error codes in the safety modules that can't be reset.
I guess they're doing a lot of recalls and have the process down pretty well.
What did you get?
I think SUVs are built on a truck chassis, while crossovers are built on a car chassis.
--Patrick
fade
Staff member
There's hardly a such thing as a real SUV anymore. That's one of my rants. People went to SUVs because they were different than minivans and station wagons. Then they complained that they were missing all the things minivans and station wagons have, so slowly (and ironically) they morphed into minivans and station wagons. A lot of the new ones only keep the most rudimentary echo of the old SUV base. It's a rant because I'm one of those people who'd like an actual SUV.
It's classified as a light truck, which means that it has a gross weight (ie, cargo plus vehicle maximum) of under 8,500 pounds and meets at least one of the following three conditions:
1) designed primarily to transport cargo, not passengers, or derived from such a vehicle
2) Designed primarily for transportation of persons and has a capacity of more than 12 persons
3) Available with special features enabling off street of off highway operation and use.
Generally most SUVs today follow #3 - they have features which enable off road use. Very few today use truck chassis, but some use truck drivetrain, however that's probably not enough to consider it a derivation under #1.[DOUBLEPOST=1477416931,1477416731][/DOUBLEPOST]Although that's the legal definition as far at the federal motor vehicle code is concerned, the industry itself hasn't settled, and in some cases you'll see vehicles advertised as SUVs but are two wheel drive and can't really be used off road on a regular basis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sport_utility_vehicle#North_America
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_truck#United_States
And some are classified as "light trucks" even though they're functionally cars or station wagons because of the lower emissions standards - they even make a joke about that on Futurama with Professor Farnsworth and Mom.
Half of an automotive engineer's job is finding ways to reduce costs, and one of those is to reclassify a vehicle so it doesn't have to meet stricter standards.
Can number three be satisfied with all wheel drive?
