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EoRaptor
Sep 13, 2003



eames posted:

Why is Intel suddenly so successful in the IGP department after trying (and failing) so hard for so many years? :confused:

Intel wanted, for many years, to adapt x86 to graphics. They therefore didn't bother to develop more than a basic graphics 'block' based on a more conventional rendering asic. Now, they've finally abandoned the x86 graphics core, and with the need to catchup are probably more willing to adopt 'not invented here' technologies to get the job done. Intel's always had the design and process skills to do this, it's been purely a corporate choice not to.

Also, we are finally seeing a 'tipping point' where good enough performance is available at a low enough power envelope on the cpu side that it is creating new device possibilities. Graphics, as it relates to the appearance of responsiveness, is now a key differentiator.

This doesn't mean intel has solved their driver problems, btw, so be prepared for plenty of quirks for a while yet.

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movax
Aug 30, 2008

Agreed posted:

If Intel gets their driver poo poo together, they stand a chance at owning way more than any one company should. Too much integration. Not... sure if they'll be allowed to keep it at that point, the bread and butter of the graphics companies are that performance range, much as enthusiasts would like to feel included. Do I want a laptop with great battery life and extremely good graphics performance compared to current options? Absolutely! Do I want Intel to own the world? Don't feel they've earned it. I don't think it's sound economics to allow monopoly on the grounds of contemporary success, regardless of how impressive it might look at the moment; the long run does not extrapolate cleanly from the short term, and it's bad decision-making to just trust a company to keep besting themselves when over time that self-interest folds over to a stronger motivation to be profitable (a motive that no longer requires extraordinary innovation, just moving things along now and again).

P.S. for FF, I'll get in touch with you soon, man, just... a lot of poo poo going on. Thanks for reaching out, sorry this is my first word back.

Hey, you're alive!


eames posted:

And then next up there’s Broadwell which will apparently bring another 40% IGP improvement on top of Haswell.

Suddenly articles like this don’t look so stupid anymore.

Why is Intel suddenly so successful in the IGP department after trying (and failing) so hard for so many years? :confused:

FWIW I just got a ~80 slide Intel roadmap for 2013/2014, and I'd say 30 slides were only about graphics stuff. They ain't loving around, which is nice because dGPU's in notebooks slaughter battery life like none other. With no dGPU that should let notebook vendors use simpler stuff like eDP as well, which can't coexist (at least of a few gens ago) with using the PEG port of the CPU.

spasticColon
Sep 22, 2004

In loving memory of Donald Pleasance
The EVGA 660Ti I got for my HDTV rig makes this humming sound regardless of GPU load or fan speed so I'm assuming its the fan motor but should I be worried? The card is running great so far but it gets a bit warm and noisy under load but that's par for the course with the stock/reference cooler.

Rexxed
May 1, 2010

Dis is amazing!
I gotta try dis!

spasticColon posted:

The EVGA 660Ti I got for my HDTV rig makes this humming sound regardless of GPU load or fan speed so I'm assuming its the fan motor but should I be worried? The card is running great so far but it gets a bit warm and noisy under load but that's par for the course with the stock/reference cooler.

It's probably coil noise, which I haven't personally experienced but I've seen mentioned in this and other threads a few times before.

spasticColon
Sep 22, 2004

In loving memory of Donald Pleasance

Rexxed posted:

It's probably coil noise, which I haven't personally experienced but I've seen mentioned in this and other threads a few times before.

I don't think its coil noise because its not nearly as high pitched and the sound is constant. If I pause a game I hear some coil whine then but I still hear the humming noise. It's not the fan because the noise does not change in volume, intensity, or pitch but I hear the fan rev up if I've been playing a game for a while and its sounds completely different from this sound. It sounds a lot like hard drive whine but I disconnected the HDD and booted into the bios and the noise was still present. If its just benign electronic noise of some kind I'm not going to worry about it because the card runs great and the noise is barely audible. Maybe the noise is coming from the motor that runs the blower/fan on the video card?

Professor Science
Mar 8, 2006
diplodocus + mortarboard = party

Factory Factory posted:

In essence, this is Intel fighting back against Nvidia's Tegra 3 and other ARM-based SoCs, extended to attack Nvidia's core business. Though Intel is very dominant in x86 laptop-through-server processors, in the broader category of "compute silicon," they've got a lot of competition from ARM and its licensees on CPUs and SoCs (as well as IBM in consoles), from AMD and Nvidia on graphics and HPC (and, to a lesser extent, PowerVR et al.), from AMD on the growingly-popular good-enough multimedia CPUs/APUs/SoCs/whatevers, Samsung on NAND. Intel is big and dominant, but it won't stay that way through size alone; it's in the top spot of a competitive oligopoly, and they can be dethroned by someone else doing better.
The interesting thing to see will be if Intel tries to make a workstation IGP. That market is based 100% on driver quality and marketing agreements (there's a reason NV has owned 90% of that market for a decade), but if you wanted to hurt NV, cheap WS IGPs would be the way to do it. Bringing down Quadro margins would put a serious damper on NV's bottom line, and the stock price would take a serious beating accordingly.

Factory Factory
Mar 19, 2010

This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.

Professor Science posted:

The interesting thing to see will be if Intel tries to make a workstation IGP. That market is based 100% on driver quality and marketing agreements (there's a reason NV has owned 90% of that market for a decade), but if you wanted to hurt NV, cheap WS IGPs would be the way to do it. Bringing down Quadro margins would put a serious damper on NV's bottom line, and the stock price would take a serious beating accordingly.

You mean like the Intel HD Graphics P4000 (PDF) found on Intel Xeon E3 v2 CPUs, with 13 ISV certifications?

Or, for that matter, the AMD FirePro APU?

Factory Factory fucked around with this message at 23:04 on Jan 10, 2013

necrobobsledder
Mar 21, 2005
Lay down your soul to the gods rock 'n roll
Nap Ghost
Workstation IGPs would be the ones in the Quadros and Fire series GPU market for folks doing CAD primarily. It's just that there's no such thing as a "workstation"-class IGP at this point.

Professor Science
Mar 8, 2006
diplodocus + mortarboard = party

Factory Factory posted:

You mean like the Intel HD Graphics P4000 (PDF) found on Intel Xeon E3 v2 CPUs, with 13 ISV certifications?

Or, for that matter, the AMD FirePro APU?
Something that could actually take on the mid-range Quadro boards, not just the low-end NVS cards. For example, the Quadro 2000 is a $400 card based around a GF106--if Intel starts taking those kinds of margins away from NV, it would be ugly.

Scalding Coffee
Jun 26, 2006

You're already dead

spasticColon posted:

The EVGA 660Ti I got for my HDTV rig makes this humming sound regardless of GPU load or fan speed so I'm assuming its the fan motor but should I be worried? The card is running great so far but it gets a bit warm and noisy under load but that's par for the course with the stock/reference cooler.
I freaked out when I heard that noise. I adjusted to it since other things around me are much louder.

Guni
Mar 11, 2010
So I have a question relating to my Sapphire 7870 GHZ OC edition card, in Far Cry 3 I get these weird purple/blue (I can't tell, colourblind, see below) colour disfiguration things over anything that is light coloured (a beach ground, Jason's skin) etc etc. Is this a concern/artifacts or is it just a glitch in FC or something else entirely?



Please excuse the lovely picture, it's in the bottom corner.

Guni fucked around with this message at 10:59 on Jan 16, 2013

coffeetable
Feb 5, 2006

TELL ME AGAIN HOW GREAT BRITAIN WOULD BE IF IT WAS RULED BY THE MERCILESS JACKBOOT OF PRINCE CHARLES

YES I DO TALK TO PLANTS ACTUALLY
Did you take a photo of your screen because they don't show up in screenshots?

And while I have no technical experience whatsoever, those remind me of the interference patterns you get between certain continuous functions and a pixel grid. Those are a special type of Moiré pattern, which are a result of undersampling and can (according to the wiki article) be fixed by turning anisotropic filtering up.

coffeetable fucked around with this message at 12:24 on Jan 16, 2013

Guni
Mar 11, 2010

coffeetable posted:

Did you take a photo of your screen because they don't show up in screenshots?

And while I have no technical experience whatsoever, those remind me of the interference patterns you get between certain continuous functions and a pixel grid

Yeah it doesn't show up in screenshots, it's only whilst I'm moving in FC3 as well, if I stand still there will be no weirdness happening.

craig588
Nov 19, 2005

by Nyc_Tattoo
I remember seeing those patterns when I used a cheap CRT years ago. I'm betting it doesn't show up in screen shots because it's a problem somewhere along the path from the videocards output to the monitors PCB before it's displayed on the panel. You don't happen to be using a VGA cable or even a digital cable from a really shady vendor?

Guni
Mar 11, 2010
I'm using a HDMI cable. It's an official xbox/Microsoft one (yeah I didn't know they were all the same when I bought it). This happens at stock clocks and when overclocked a bit too, so I would doubt it's anything relating to that. Also, AFAIK this sort of thing only happens in FC3 and only in the specific settings I mentioned (sandy beaches, Jason's arm, fire, the road sometimes, a tigers light stripe) and things like that, it won't happen on say a green plant/grass or the like. I unfortunately don't have another cable to really try and see if it is the cable, I guess I could rustle one up and have a looksie. It's not really a concern, more an annoyance and I'm really only asking the question in case the card is faulty.

Also it's worth noting I can constantly replicate this as well, it's not a one time thing/a couple of occurrences.

craig588
Nov 19, 2005

by Nyc_Tattoo
I'm pretty confidant it's not a problem with the videocard or from overclocking. There might even be a setting you can mess with in your monitors control panel (Maybe reducing overdrive? Sharpness? Dynamic contrast? Disabling any processing or special features the monitor might have could get rid of it). I've only seen it happen because of problems on the last step of the displaying an image process. Not that something else couldn't cause it, but the only time I saw it I could consistently reproduce it on one specific monitor. If it makes you feel any better the monitor never got worse and lasted for years without any problems before I sold it.

Instrumedley
Aug 13, 2009

Rexxed posted:

The brand doesn't make a huge difference. I've used Arctic silver 2, 5, and Ceramique (non metallic), but there's plenty of graphs showing minor differences in how thermal paste performs, it's just getting a new layer of it in there that's important. I'd shop for whatever's cheapest.

I tried out the first compound you mentioned (Arctic Silver) and it worked great. (Temps: 21 C idle, 51 C while under load). Thanks!

unpronounceable
Apr 4, 2010

You mean we still have another game to go through?!
Fallen Rib
You know the random frame time spikes that the AMD cards were having? Well the new, and as of yet, unreleased beta drivers help smooth them out a lot. In the Tech Report article, they tested a 7950 with new and old drivers against a 660Ti in Skyrim, Borderlands 2, and Guild Wars 2. In all games, there was a marked improvement with the new drivers.

In their conclusion, they mention that a lot of the improvement came from application specific tweaks, but they're working on some things that will improve performance across the board. Notably, they're working on a new memory manager that works better with the new architecture.

Something that surprised me, though, was that AMD had not been looking at individual frame times in their internal testing, while nVidia began looking at them sometime in one of the Fermi generations.

In any case, it's good to see AMD fixing these problems, and I look forward to seeing how much better new driver improvements will make them. It's surprising, that reviewers started looking at frame times earlier than they did.

Agreed
Dec 30, 2003

The price of meat has just gone up, and your old lady has just gone down

AMD's resource deficit compared to nVidia (... and others) causes a lot of this. All video drivers are a combo package of integral hardware-software management plus a whopping pack of application-specific hacks. nVidia is just way better at the latter, thanks to superior resources, not the least of which is developer support at the individual team level that ensures excellent access to games in development for compatibility purposes on nVidia's side of things. When they can, they work very closely with developers. Sometimes they do something so neat they show it off, like the Borderlands 2 :aaaaa: vids and later gameplay experience! But regardless, they're generally trying hard to get in there and make things happen for their driver team.

If you look at the comparative quality of AMD's professional cards driver support and application integration and how nVidia does things, the picture of why nVidia runs the high end despite much higher per-unit prices than AMD's ostensibly equal-or-better suited cards clears up really quickly, too. Intel might be able to challenge them in the compute market at their scale, but I don't think AMD has the resources to commit - so they just try to ensure open-whatever compatibility and then sell their best compute cards cheap, but a lot of the cost of running extremely high performance computing is tied into the development of application specific stuff and nVidia hands them their asses in that arena.

Agreed fucked around with this message at 05:37 on Jan 17, 2013

HalloKitty
Sep 30, 2005

Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast

unpronounceable posted:

You know the random frame time spikes that the AMD cards were having? Well the new, and as of yet, unreleased beta drivers help smooth them out a lot. In the Tech Report article, they tested a 7950 with new and old drivers against a 660Ti in Skyrim, Borderlands 2, and Guild Wars 2. In all games, there was a marked improvement with the new drivers.

Wow, drat, they've really improved the frame latencies in just one driver revision. I guess they can fix the problem, excellent!

Factory Factory
Mar 19, 2010

This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.
<:mad:>

Well, my CrossFire setup has now annoyed me greatly for the first time. I picked up Sleeping Dogs during the last Steam sale and I went to play it just now, and it crashes the poo poo out of the video driver. Apparently this is just A Thing with Sleeping Dogs, even this far out since release on an AMD logo program game.

If Catalyst 13.1 doesn't fix things for me (from 12.11), anyone interested in a pair of 6850s?

CFox
Nov 9, 2005
That's strange, I'm running dual 6850s and haven't had any trouble at all with it. Of course I'm annoyed with mine for different reasons so I don't blame you for wanting to change over.

Endymion FRS MK1
Oct 29, 2011

I don't know what this thing is, and I don't care. I'm just tired of seeing your stupid newbie av from 2011.
I don't know if you're running Windows 8, but according to the release notes, well...

AMD posted:

Known Issues

The following section provides a summary of open issues that may be experienced with the AMD Catalyst 13.1 software suite.

Known issues under the Windows 8 Operating System.

Sleeping Dogs – game may fail to launch in certain configurations

Edit: Also, AMD did something else neat alongside 13.1, they made a Catalyst Un-install Utility. I haven't actually tried it, but I assume it works like the old ATIman uninstaller, only official and developed alongside the drivers. Maybe AMD's driver team is actually getting their poo poo together? The 12.11 betas and this make me think so.

Endymion FRS MK1 fucked around with this message at 21:51 on Jan 18, 2013

HalloKitty
Sep 30, 2005

Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast

Endymion FRS MK1 posted:

I don't know if you're running Windows 8, but according to the release notes, well...


Edit: Also, AMD did something else neat alongside 13.1, they made a Catalyst Un-install Utility. I haven't actually tried it, but I assume it works like the old ATIman uninstaller, only official and developed alongside the drivers. Maybe AMD's driver team is actually getting their poo poo together? The 12.11 betas and this make me think so.

Their CPUs suck, the GPU division is actually not bad, and they need to make sure they're making every effort to fix poo poo, which is vastly preferable to going under. So I imagine so.

Endymion FRS MK1
Oct 29, 2011

I don't know what this thing is, and I don't care. I'm just tired of seeing your stupid newbie av from 2011.

HalloKitty posted:

Their CPUs suck, the GPU division is actually not bad, and they need to make sure they're making every effort to fix poo poo, which is vastly preferable to going under. So I imagine so.

Honestly, I hope when AMD does go under their GPU division splits and reforms ATI or something. I've been red since my first Rage (minus buying a GTX260), would preferably stay that way. I'll buy Nvidia if it is more practical, but given same price/performance, I'll stick with a Radeon any day.

GRINDCORE MEGGIDO
Feb 28, 1985


Endymion FRS MK1 posted:

I'll stick with a Radeon any day.

I wouldn't, I'd buy either, but when I go nVidia again I hope to gently caress they've fixed the driver has stopped responding bug I had with two five series cards in different systems, one not mine. It is irrational to think they haven't, but.. still.

GRINDCORE MEGGIDO fucked around with this message at 03:21 on Jan 19, 2013

Proud Christian Mom
Dec 20, 2006
READING COMPREHENSION IS HARD
We're at the point I don't think either AMD or nVidia is going to get them 100% right but right now nVidia can get it fixed quicker than AMD can and that sucks since they do make very good products.

Factory Factory
Mar 19, 2010

This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.

Endymion FRS MK1 posted:

I don't know if you're running Windows 8, but according to the release notes, well...


Edit: Also, AMD did something else neat alongside 13.1, they made a Catalyst Un-install Utility. I haven't actually tried it, but I assume it works like the old ATIman uninstaller, only official and developed alongside the drivers. Maybe AMD's driver team is actually getting their poo poo together? The 12.11 betas and this make me think so.

Win 7 x64. Hopefully it will work out, then, when I try again. In the meantime, I've been playing with some new speakers on my HTPC. Corsair SP2500 :getin:

Factory Factory fucked around with this message at 05:17 on Jan 19, 2013

Jan
Feb 27, 2008

The disruptive powers of excessive national fecundity may have played a greater part in bursting the bonds of convention than either the power of ideas or the errors of autocracy.
For what it's worth, a colleague of mine worked at ATI and he is adamant that their hardware design team is excellent, but the driver guys just aren't able to keep up.

Can't really blame them for that, PC drivers must be one of the most finnicky pieces of software to write.

Boten Anna
Feb 22, 2010

I'm just surprised that 11 versions of DirectX in it sounds like even down to variants of the same model, there is a lot of very low level tweaking and custom coding that needs to be done to get decent performance out of video cards, or sometimes even to work at all. I would think by now there'd be more abstraction and standardization but it seems like change is just happening at too rapid of a pace still to allow for that.

I don't even know if it's a problem that you can throw money at to make go away. It sounds like it needs some very special, dedicated, incredibly knowledgeable people that may or may not even exist to get the drivers right, and quickly.

Factory Factory
Mar 19, 2010

This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.
A bit of context along those lines: Catalyst and Nvidia's drivers are each about the same size as a Windows 95 installation. Graphics drivers are practically an entire OS.

Yaos
Feb 22, 2003

She is a cat of significant gravy.

Factory Factory posted:

A bit of context along those lines: Catalyst and Nvidia's drivers are each about the same size as a Windows 95 installation. Graphics drivers are practically an entire OS.
A lot of that are all the optimizations for individual games. A while back somebody was showing a screenshot of the games includes for some reason, and one of the games listed could not even run on modern systems; they never take anything out.

Argas
Jan 13, 2008
SRW Fanatic




wipeout posted:

I wouldn't, I'd buy either, but when I go nVidia again I hope to gently caress they've fixed the driver has stopped responding bug I had with two five series cards in different systems, one not mine. It is irrational to think they haven't, but.. still.

AFAIK, that's not so much a bug as it's the GPU basically unshitting itself. The alternative, I've read, is that whatever caused the shitup may end up locking up your system. It's definitely annoying though.

kuddles
Jul 16, 2006

Like a fist wrapped in blood...

Yaos posted:

A lot of that are all the optimizations for individual games. A while back somebody was showing a screenshot of the games includes for some reason, and one of the games listed could not even run on modern systems; they never take anything out.
Yeah, not that I think the cases of them having poor driver support is always excusable from them, but when you think about it, practically no other commercial driver is expected to provide optimized performance for new software as soon as possible while at the same time maintaining nearly 100% backwards compatibility with thousands of titles spanning over a decade. I'm sure it's a bitch to work on, as evidenced by the notes on the driver software, which suggests a common issue is fixing an issue with one game under a specific architecture only to have a different game break because of it.

Factory Factory
Mar 19, 2010

This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.
Catalyst 13.1 did indeed fix my problem.

Endymion FRS MK1
Oct 29, 2011

I don't know what this thing is, and I don't care. I'm just tired of seeing your stupid newbie av from 2011.

Factory Factory posted:

Catalyst 13.1 did indeed fix my problem.

The magic of AMD's new driver team.

It probably broke something else.

Jan
Feb 27, 2008

The disruptive powers of excessive national fecundity may have played a greater part in bursting the bonds of convention than either the power of ideas or the errors of autocracy.
Gave 13.1 a try, hoping it might have helped with the stutters I get in SWTOR, but nope. Those are just a lousy engine making blocking loads on the main thread or some poo poo. :shepface:

On the bright side, I figured out that contrarily to usual habit, turning VSync majorly helps most games when running Crossfire. So all the stutters I had in Dishonored went away, same for Skyrim. The only exception is Guild Wars 2, which still gets worse performance in most areas when using Crossfire than not. Unless that's changed with 13.1...

Alereon
Feb 6, 2004

Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed
College Slice
Vsync is required for Alternate Frame Rendering mode, if I remember correctly (that may have been changed). That's the most efficient multi-GPU rendering mode (though it maximizes micro-stutter), I always had Vsync forced-on globally when I ran Crossfire. I found it illuminating to have GPU-Z running to show me how loaded each GPU was, you can often find tweaks to improve Crossfire scaling a bit.

Astrobastard
Dec 31, 2008



Winky Face

Instrumedley posted:

I tried out the first compound you mentioned (Arctic Silver) and it worked great. (Temps: 21 C idle, 51 C while under load). Thanks!

Just to jump in on this, I build around 5-8 PC's per year for the past 5 years and I ended up giving this a go. Using so much of the stuff, it can get so expensive, but if you see yourself upgrading frequently in the future, I'd grab this-

http://dx.com/p/stars-professional-thermal-compound-with-injection-tube-10-pack-13915

It kept temps on my H70 LOWER than AS5 (the AS5 was around 6 months old), and this cheap stuff is fine although the changing seasons may cloud my immediate judgement as I change components alot, but the CPU cooler hasn't budged for a year at least. I don't see myself buying anymore thermal paste for a while and I chucked a few to friends for a euro each and that's made up the price already.

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future ghost
Dec 5, 2005

:byetankie:
Gun Saliva

Astrobastard posted:

Just to jump in on this, I build around 5-8 PC's per year for the past 5 years and I ended up giving this a go. Using so much of the stuff, it can get so expensive, but if you see yourself upgrading frequently in the future, I'd grab this-

http://dx.com/p/stars-professional-thermal-compound-with-injection-tube-10-pack-13915

It kept temps on my H70 LOWER than AS5 (the AS5 was around 6 months old), and this cheap stuff is fine although the changing seasons may cloud my immediate judgement as I change components alot, but the CPU cooler hasn't budged for a year at least. I don't see myself buying anymore thermal paste for a while and I chucked a few to friends for a euro each and that's made up the price already.
There's really not a huge difference between TIM, usually hitting 1-2 C at most: http://skinneelabs.com/2011-thermal-paste-review-comparison/2/

I usually use MX-4 since it's cheap and non-conductive, although the ancient tube of ceramique I still have for GPU heatsinks works fine. The basic stuff I got with my HR-02 (Chillfactor3) works about as well as MX-4 so I haven't bothered changing it.

Which TIM you use is far less important than not using too much of it, with the caveat that you shouldn't use conductive stuff on graphics cards if you can avoid it. Since ceramique can be found at Radioshack for $5, there's no reason not to use it for those.

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