PC General Discussion Thread

[underzr0]

Originally Posted by Power666

DirectX 10.1 is a minor update and developers are still adjusting to Direct X 10. The move to DirectX 10 is a slow one due to the requirement of Windows Vista and it hasn't really provided that much for gamers currently. Between the sloth performance of Vista in general and additional sluggishness DirectX 10 effects have on current graphics cards, most gamers are sticking with Windows XP. In other words, waiting for a DirectX 10.1 card instead of DirectX 10 is kinda foolish at this point in time. due to the massive lack of software.

SLI is a technology that looks great on paper but has been hampered by driver issues and CPU bottlenecks. The driver issues for Windows XP has calmed down a bit but SLI under Vista still has some serious quirks. The CPU bottleneck is the big thing hurting SLI. Processors aren't fast enough to continually feed two graphics cards, especially for single threaded games. There are some clever optimizations that can be done with dual core chips and SLI but developers consider that market too much of a niche to implement them. Crossfire is no different in this regard.

So for SLI it requires a good processor and is best on XP?

[Dax]

Originally Posted by Mallhew

Elaborate.

It is true, ask Power666.

[underzr0]

Where do i go to find out the system requirements for games on the internet?

[Power666]

Originally Posted by underzr0

So for SLI it requires a good processor and is best on XP?

Yeah, SLI is wasted on a slow processor. By slow processor, I'm emphasizing clock speed here. For example, you'd take a dual core chip with a higher clock speed over a quad core chip running at a lower clock speed. Vista has its share of bugs but those will eventually be worked out over time. nVidia (and ATI for Crossfire) have been steadily improving SLI under Vista but it is still plagued with bugs.

[Romanc]

Originally Posted by underzr0

Where do i go to find out the system requirements for games on the internet?

Sites such as gamespot usually have an option called "game details" on every game's page. System requirements should be there for PC games.

[underzr0]

for building a computer, what do i look for in a motherboard?

and would it work to get another vid card and activated SLI later once they fixed all the problems for windows vista?

[chedabob]

Originally Posted by underzr0

for building a computer, what do i look for in a motherboard?

and would it work to get another vid card and activated SLI later once they fixed all the problems for windows vista?

Buy a board with SLi, just to make it future-proof. Buy 1 decent graphics card, that has SLi or Crossfire, and then upgrade later. Although I've heard that you are usually better off just buying 1 big monster card than 2 not so big cards.

Also, don't go Quad Core. I read something somewhere the other day, and it showed benchmarks between Dual and Quad core, and if anything, the extra 2 cores cripple your machine. I'll find the link for you.

[Power666]

Originally Posted by chedabob

Buy a board with SLi, just to make it future-proof. Buy 1 decent graphics card, that has SLi or Crossfire, and then upgrade later. Although I've heard that you are usually better off just buying 1 big monster card than 2 not so big cards.

Right now, I'd say investing in a more capable graphics card initially is the wiser choice in the long run. Graphics cards performance increases so quickly and prices drop so fast it is ridiculous. The performance benefits of SLI are typically limited by CPU power (remember games are typically single threaded) that it isn't worth the investment. Oh how I wished Apple stuck with PowerPC chips as the POWER6 processor is busy kicking ass at 4.8 Ghz right now higher clocked models to come next year.

The one interesting thing I've seen nVidia and AMD talk about is doing physics on the GPU. Thus an old video card can be used for physics calculations independently of the primary video card. I see this as better use for multiple PCI-E 16X slots.

Originally Posted by chedabob

Also, don't go Quad Core. I read something somewhere the other day, and it showed benchmarks between Dual and Quad core, and if anything, the extra 2 cores cripple your machine. I'll find the link for you.

You really have to look at what is being done and what is being compared. Currently for gaming, clock speed is still the major factor in gaming performance. So a 3.0 Ghz dual core chip is currently the better performer than a 2.4 Ghz quad core chip based on the same architecture.

For applications that are heavily multithreaded, the performance gains are typically limited by memory latency and bandwidth unless the program can run entirely out of a chip's cache. Intel's front side bus architecture flat out sucks for multiprocessing. AMD's new quad core chips introduced tomorrow should provide a much better improvement going from two to four cores on the same architecture due to their on-die memory controller.

[chedabob]

Originally Posted by Power666

You really have to look at what is being done and what is being compared. Currently for gaming, clock speed is still the major factor in gaming performance. So a 3.0 Ghz dual core chip is currently the better performer than a 2.4 Ghz quad core chip based on the same architecture.

For applications that are heavily multithreaded, the performance gains are typically limited by memory latency and bandwidth unless the program can run entirely out of a chip's cache. Intel's front side bus architecture flat out sucks for multiprocessing. AMD's new quad core chips introduced tomorrow should provide a much better improvement going from two to four cores on the same architecture due to their on-die memory controller.

Yeah, you do get the extra performance if you have an application that can do more than 4 threads. But the problem is, not enough applications are written like that. The O/S can only do so much. Vista has improved leaps and bounds in terms of multi-core and multi-thread support, but the real performance comes from writing applications that don't rely upon the O/S to do the multithreading. Like you said, most games are written for a single thread (although if they support dual-core, then I think they do up to 4), so they just don't scale well to quad-core. Applications like 3DS max do scale well (although Autodesk did just release a patch for quad support). At the moment, dual-core is the way to go for gaming. Even multi-threading on a single core is still a relatively new concept. I have an Athlon X2, which does 2 threads on each core, but I think most of it goes to waste. Even on the newer games like Bioshock, only 1 core is ever pushed to its limit. The other one remains pretty much idle.

Oh, and heres the article I mentioned:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000942.html

[underzr0]

I'm not going to go Quad Core.

but for the motherboard, how do you know if it is good?