Re: Building computer
On 10/1/2013 5:13 PM, Catherine Gramze wrote:
>>> On Sep 30, 2013, at 10:33 PM, Stan Hoeppner <stan@hardwarefreak.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Actually they were, up to the point you finally told us what screen
>> resolution you use. That changes things quite a bit, or I should say
>> changed one thing dramatically.
>
>> I recommended a fast dual core CPU because more cores will be wasted.
>> The i3-4340 3.6GHz Haswell would have been as fast as the quad core you
>> bought, and saved ~$40-50. 4GB RAM, more than 4GB is wasted, but as I
>> said previously it's cheap so buy more if you want, won't hurt. An SSD,
>> and APU graphics. The only change in that recommendation, now that I
>> know your screen resolution, is shifting to a very fast high bandwidth
>> discrete card. 2560x1440 is a pretty insanely high gaming res if you
>> want high frame rates and smooth rendering at high detail. Most "hard
>> core" gamers wouldn't touch 2560x1440 without SLI/Xfire.
>
>> If going w/a single reasonably priced card you're going to want/need a
>> model with a 384 bit bus. Extremely high resolutions require extremely
>> high memory bandwidth. The 384bit nVidia models are all above $600.
>> The AMD 7950s can be had in the low $200s, and the 7970s in the low
>> $300s. Both are 384bit.
>
> You are right about the quad core not making any real difference. I have
> run the activity monitor and observed how one core is at 70% and another
> at 22% and two others unused. Average user applications are not yet written
> to take advantage of multiple core processors.
Nor will they ever be. I'm glad you looked into it and see it now. If
you search the list archives you'll see I've written a bit on the
multi-core issue, made the dual core recommendation many times, and went
so far as to suggest a new dual core design that AMD or Intel could
produce that would benefit everyone. But they're shackled to multi-core
now because their marketing of the past 6 years or so has tried to
convince everyone that more cores are better. Why? Because they're
unable to increase per core performance at a rate which justifies buying
new CPUs. If they did they'd have to reverse their marketing message,
and that is just fraught with problems.
The problem of efficient parallel programming will be with us for a VERY
long time. And it's not that programmers, specifically game
programmers, aren't crafty or smart enough to write parallel code. They
are far more capable than others. The problems is that only a finite
amount of a given program's flow logic can be parallelized. The rest
must remain serial. And that serial part dominates most desktop
applications, including games. That's why more cores don't help beyond
two for the vast majority of desktop applications and games. See
Amdahl's law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law
This is the limiting factor. And this is why I implore people to buy
the fastest dual core and forgo the quad, six, eight core models. And
in fact, for non gamer daily use, I recommend the single core AMD
Sempron, because a dual core is wasted with Firefox, Thunderbird, Flash,
Adobe Reader, etc.
I failed to make a convincing case before you purchased Catherine. But
at least you'll now be armed with this information when you make your
next purchase. Financially it's not a huge deal, maybe $50 more in this
case, 10% of the system price, for the quad core. But two cores will
forever be wasted, and that $50 could have gone toward the discrete GPU
you need.
> I am glad you finally understand that my desire for a dedicated video card
> with a substantial amount of dedicated video ram was not just a case of
> "bigger, better, faster, more" but based on the reality of what is required
> to
> do what I do. I can't imagine what screen resolution you thought I had in
> mind.
> 1024x768? It hurts my old eyes to look at those.
We all make incorrect assumptions at times. I keyed on one thing you
stated, which didn't get corrected until way late in the thread. That
was "I am retired". When I saw that I pegged you at 60+, or at least
late 50s. I only know a few people in that age range, or older, playing
WOW or any games, and they do it on big box brand PCs with integrated
video on ~21 in screens. However, they run a resolution much lower than
the panel native res so it's easier to read text without needing to use
the 2nd/3rd lenses of their bi/trifocals, for instance 1280x720 instead
of the panel native 1920x1080. At 1280x720 a discrete GPU is overkill
for their needs.
This was my mistake for not asking point blank early in the thread what
res you were running instead of making assumptions based on your retired
status. If I had asked more questions up front we could have avoided
the contention. For that I apologize.
> I have also looked at my memory usage. At this very moment, not running
> WoW, I have 5.22 gig being used. 4 gig would not be sufficient for me.
You would be correct if the number you're looking at reflected
application memory usage. But it doesn't. On any of the modern
operating systems one must damn near be a computer scientist to see the
actual memory usage. The 5.22GB, this is on Debian, yes? The system
monitor? This reports process and cache memory usage. The buffer/cache
will literally eat nearly all available memory all the time on Linux,
then free some when an application process needs it. I've never used
OSX but it's probably similar in its desktop reporting tool.
This will really throw you for a loop. Open a shell window and execute
~$ sudo echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
Wait a few seconds and see what happens to that 5.22GB number. Then
report back what you find. You can do this while playing WOW as well.
That number will drop like a rock and WOW will keep on going, because
the memory you're freeing with that command is cache. And again, Linux
will eat nearly all RAM for cache if the system is up long enough.
> I do thank you for the advice pertaining to a 384 bit bus and a gig more
> video ram than I was planning to get. That is advice that I will be
> following.
You're welcome. Keep in mind that at 2560x1440 the 7950/7970 may still
not be fast enough for full detail in WOW with GPU settings on high.
The extra GB of VRAM won't get utilized but you need the memory
bandwidth of a 384bit bus. Nobody sells, AFAICT, a 2GB model using
these GPUs.
I can't tell you where the setting resides, or if you have to edit
xorg.conf, but you will want to use double buffering, not triple
buffering. You'll also want to disable full screen antialiasing (FSAA)
and anisotropic filtering, or set them to very low values such as 2x or
4x, or play with the settings until you strike the right balance. They
are variable from off to 16x. These are driver settings for the GPU.
They affect the image quality by smoothing the pixels of straight lines
and the edges of objects in the scene, i.e. removing "jaggies", such as
on the ears or dangling hair of characters, the tip of arrows sticking
out of a quiver, etc.
You may be able to tweak these on the MAC to get acceptable smoothness
from your 6970 as well. GPUs are infinitely tweakable to balance speed
against image quality.
>
> On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 12:10 PM, Stan Hoeppner <stan@hardwarefreak.com>wrote:
>
>> On 10/1/2013 12:29 AM, Rhiamom wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> Sent from my iPad
>>>
>>>> On Sep 30, 2013, at 10:33 PM, Stan Hoeppner <stan@hardwarefreak.com>
>> wrote:
>> ...
>>>> It's quite funny to see someone of your knowledge level tell me I'm
>>>> wrong by quoting the cardboard box as your evidence, while I'm
>>>> demonstrating how the transistors and everything else work to get to a
>>>> realistic set of requirements...
>>>
>>> This is the crux of the matter. Your requirements are not realistic for
>> how
>>
>> Actually they were, up to the point you finally told us what screen
>> resolution you use. That changes things quite a bit, or I should say
>> changed one thing dramatically.
>>
>> I recommended a fast dual core CPU because more cores will be wasted.
>> The i3-4340 3.6GHz Haswell would have been as fast as the quad core you
>> bought, and saved ~$40-50. 4GB RAM, more than 4GB is wasted, but as I
>> said previously it's cheap so buy more if you want, won't hurt. An SSD,
>> and APU graphics. The only change in that recommendation, now that I
>> know your screen resolution, is shifting to a very fast high bandwidth
>> discrete card. 2560x1440 is a pretty insanely high gaming res if you
>> want high frame rates and smooth rendering at high detail. Most "hard
>> core" gamers wouldn't touch 2560x1440 without SLI/Xfire.
>>
>> If going w/a single reasonably priced card you're going to want/need a
>> model with a 384 bit bus. Extremely high resolutions require extremely
>> high memory bandwidth. The 384bit nVidia models are all above $600.
>> The AMD 7950s can be had in the low $200s, and the 7970s in the low
>> $300s. Both are 384bit.
>>
>>> I want to use my computer. You may be able to happily exist on your
>> minimal
>>> memory, ruthlessly eliminating background processes and OS features. I do
>>> not choose to do that. Your expert knowledge is worthless to me, because
>> it
>>> requires me to alter the basic way I use my computer. In fact, it is
>> worse than
>>> useless, because some poor sap might follow your advice and then wonder
>>> why they have performance issues with their brand new computer.
>>
>> No it doesn't change the way you use your computer. Because the specs I
>> gave actually match how you currently use your computer. You simply
>> don't know it, because you're not using the tools at your disposal which
>> inform you of what system resources you're using.
>>
>> Run top, install Munin, etc, and look at the percentage of each CPU core
>> that is used, and how much memory is used by your applications. You'll
>> be very surprised. Then look at the GPU driver control panel while
>> running WOW and see how much of the video RAM is in use. At 2560x1440
>> it may be pretty high.
>>
>> The 7950/7970 both sport 3GB of VRAM do you shouldn't fall short there.
>>
>>>> It doesn't matter as you already bought your system. But I find it
>>>> interesting that you will be running integrated graphics for the time
>>>> being, after you stated this is wholly inadequate.
>>>>
>>>> I also find it interesting that not once did you mention that you may
>>>> try your old 6970 in the new box, before plunking down unnecessary cash
>>>> on yet another high end video card.
>>>
>>> Yes, I will be running the integrated graphics for a few weeks while I
>> adapt to
>>> the new box. It is only temporary.
>>>
>>> The 6970 is in my iMac, and will remain there. Note that even with 2 gig
>> of
>>> dedicated video memory I am not able to play WoW on all high settings
>> with
>>> the 6970.
>>
>> Again, that's not because there's not enough GPU memory, it's because
>> the DRAM bus isn't fast enough, or the chip itself isn't fast enough, or
>> both, for that insanely high resolution.
>>
>> --
>> Stan
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