Thursday 30 June 2016

THE RADEON RX480 THOUGHTS

Well the NDA has lifted.

I flicked through several reviews to see whats what.

Sounded in some as what was expected and stated by AMD while in others it did a little less and around and even see below a GeForce 970? Weird.

What was stranger still was the power draw of the RX480. Not normally something I looked at and only did because of the talk of efficiency I did spot a few graphs and something caught my eye.

In several I looked at I noticed the power draw to be above 150W and I thought the benchmarks were BS ... except I only ever look at sites with good reputations?!

The problem with this is that the PC-Express sockets are only rated at 75 Watts and the 6 pin connector is the same at 75 Watts. So how can the card be drawing more than 150 Watts? Then I thought that maybe with some motherboards they might be rated higher? But that certainly would not be the case with all of them.

Then I found that there was indeed an issue and as a result some people testing the cards were deciding not to overclock their test cards. I mean if your getting over 150 Watts already you do not want to tempt fate. I actually read a power draw of 200 Watt written somewhere, provided that was not BS.

Someone thought that nVidia might have rushed their 1070s and 1080s and I am beginning to think it might be the other way around? Or perhaps they were both trigger happy worrying about what the other one was going to do far too much?

This new generation of 16nm and 14nm chips is working out very bizarre this time around and far from straightforward. I hope nothing untoward happens with Zen.

Though saying that this is not necessarily a hug thing. Could turn out to be ... I mean that the extra wattage might be going through the 6 pin connector which may be able to handle it. As opposed to a dissolving motherboard?

They could simply add a power connector to the cards while ones purchased would have to be returned to manufacturers. But then most people are probably waiting for the cards from Asus, MSI, Sapphire and others, AIB, anyway that probably wont have this issue. Unless they have been silly too and been stock-piling the things up like AMD have done?

It still looks like a good card for the money ... though some tests have it close to a nVidia 980 while the odd one close to a 970. But it is good to see this level come down to the price point it is at. AFter all once everything has levelled out with supply the cost of cards lke these can only ever go downwards which means everyone benefits.

Anyway there is this link on Reddit that has a few details about the power draw ...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/4qfwd4/rx480_fails_pcie_specification/

Wednesday 22 June 2016

A SMALL BACKLASH

I am stating this is small as it appears to be thus far.

This may turn out to be something far bigger in time and mostly because most of the drooling people make the first few hundred comments because they cannot wait. Plus they do not mind bending over with their pants around their ankles to get what they are drooling over.

However due to the location of the link below I finally have something that shows that others are beginning to see that I stated bloody years ago.. yes, literally years.

Even as I am typing on my junk Roccat keyboard that keeps adding keystrokes I am thinking of the irony of all the ripping off that has and is going on.

Now I was not familiar with the prices of nVidia's 970 and 980 families of graphics cards so this was kind of lot on me.

I also want to state that I used to buy every issue of Custom PC magazine until I started noticing two things ...


  1. They were talking through their arses about what you can and cannot play games on which seemed to tally up nicely to the fact that ...
  2. Intel and nVidia tech was always praised, even when things surfaced later on about total bollocks going on with the tech. TIM, 5% increases in performance, 20% prices and other things
Now then...

I stated long ago that I stopped purchasing Custom PC Magazine and that despite the cover price being hiked beyond that of many books they were becoming biased to the point of lying.

Now they recently did a review of nVidia's 1080 and 1070 graphics cards, which I for one was disappointed in. VR performance was a big improvement ... everything else ... not so much no matter what reviewers say what ... they are blowing it out of their holes. The process node should have been better than this and some tests suggest it was a decrease.

Now the part I did not pick up on ... the prices were substantially higher than the cards they replaced, the 970 and the 980. Some have said this is not the case ... fuck ... off!

The other thing is that I thought immediately ... hang on a moment ... you pay for a wafer and that price is fixed ... so with smaller chip[s your getting way, way (no exaggeration here), way more chips per wafer than with the previous ones.

In theory this can mean that the cost of any one chip could be 50% to 70% that of the previous chips on the bigger process nodes. So how come the new cards have gone up by that same percentage?

Because they think we are are all idiots? Or because they think there are enough idiots to keep those selling at the overblown prices for at least 6 months to a year?!

Bot to my surprise on Custom PC's site a few commenters have pointed out this becoming obvious and not just with Custom PC Magazine. In fact they mention a number of the YouTube reviewers who are seen as the big guns on YouTube, like JaysTwoCents and LinusTechTips. Oh dear.

One asked why they had not seen one single mention of the high prices and that everyone gives the stuff the recommended and the extreme awards. They rightly point out that we are supposed to trust these guys to inform us honestly.

In some of the possible reasons in the comments there is the excuses that they have to rely on these vendors giving them stuff to survive ... well does that not then suggest that YouTube and Google are being totally unfair to YouTubers and Bloggers?!

Google? Unfair? Noooo, there's a surprise! The company that claims to be for the people, humane and fair?! Yeah, right.

So for me to see people actually saying this is like a breath of fresh air and relief that some more of the thinks I quote, claim and predict (albeit on another blog) has and is coming to light.

The other hilarious thing is that I was involved in a family argument for my Christmas because one family member who is into music tech believes all the crap they give out. Oddly it was about What Hifi Magazine and I pointed out that one review they printed was utter shit. Well blow me down if What Hifi does not go and get mentioned in the comments of the Custom PC Magazine website comments?!

I will have to bookmark that for a later date but will tell other family members that also thought the one I argued with was naive.

The only thing is this is small potatoes. I know it will take an inordinate amount of time for the majority to finally bloody realise that not only is this practice going on but has been going on for a very, very long time!

*SIGH*


Monday 20 June 2016

THE ORIGINAL MIRRORS EDGE

Well Mirrors Edge was another title I totally missed in my long sabbatical from PC games.

In fact I only learned of its existence when I read about the follow up, Mirror's Edge Catalyst, which intrigued me.

I was not entirely sure about this title, I have to tell you. This is because I have this rather annoying fear of heights, though I prefer to say fear of gravity and I have a theory on that like everything else.

That may sound ... well, weird but let me tell you it can and did translate over into games .. but not all games, curiously.

I had no problem in most titles or being up a mountain in Skyrim, for example. I did, however, get the shock of my life when my fear of heights kicked in climbing those ... umm beacons in FarCry 3!

Yup after the first couple I dreaded the damn things ... I still climbed them even though it got worse later on as they got more and more run-down and with segments and stairs, ladders missing. In fact I remember kudos to the programmers for actually making me feel I was up high, along with cursing them! Lol.

Dying Light was another one.

Other than these two titles I did not have much of a fear of the heights I was at and this is also true in the original Mirrors Edge.

As I was interested in Mirrors Edge Catalyst I did want to try this one out and play it through before playaing Catalyst and had to go for it when I saw it on Origin for a couple of quid! Was still £9.99 on Steam so I took the plunge and was looking for something else to keep me occupied anyway. Well in between going in and out of The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt to finish the last fifth to one quarter of the game that is.

My Plays.TV program seems to only work at less then half the time currently but it did record a few plays so I thought I might upload them to my YouTube account?

I am stuck on this part where after a fight with a runner you chase them. Firs off I got my arse handed to me several times before I changed my strategy. I then kicked their arse a dozen times before I wondered why it was taking so long and then saw their gun turn red. Oh, so to win I have to disarm them?! Yeah getting a kicking from me for an hour is no good, lol.

Chase them through a building and then you have to do this console like button sequence, I hope Catalyst is not like this, jump-turn to wall-jump, spin, jump, swing, jump, climb over then chase. Then bloody relieved I finally nailed it and then yo chase them a long way then run out of bloody time! I think just as I was at the end of the sequence too as they were standing in front of me?!

Rage quit?

Nahh, some swear words as I was pushed right back to that jump-jump-spin-undress and run naked, you know what I mean. Still tried it another dozen times, pulled it off to my relief .... later ran out of time again!

Then I rage quit!

LMAO!









On a funny note I have had these choice people saying some choice stuff because I took issue with games they love, got how bloody sad can you get.

It got better when one with a similar name to a sad twat I knew told me to fuck off and call me a loser and I ripped him one. He did not take the hint and sounded threatening as well as stating he had a better history of gaming than I did. So I gave him my history, tester for WAP for smartphones, interview with Pivotal Games for Desert Storm series and then told him I had gamed on Commodores VIC-20 and Amiga! Oh and he said I was being disrespectful to him for poking fun out of his English. That is before pointing out to him that he swore and called me a loser and therefore cannot speak to anyone else about being disrespectful.

They are so easy to wind up. I do like to wind them up and watch them go, though this one did not bite and his very last comment was 'That's nice!', lmao.

Good God how I hate idiots and especially when they are idiot fanboys! Grow the fuck up!

Another one took the piss, well a couple did, out of my Witcher 3 gameplay and me grumping about it and pointed out I was shit. Yeah except other than the fact it was on the hardest difficulty and they did not think to ask themselves this, the video was from May 2015 and it is now June 2016!

Obviously quite a few cannot bloody read either?!

LMFAO!

Tuesday 14 June 2016

MY E3 2016 THOUGHTS

Hmm been waiting for this and it has finally started ...

... I am still waiting for ... this.

So there has been the first few days of flurries of news and as per usual all the headlines in the links say "All this latest and most exciting games revealed here!" or something to that effect.

Umm, no.

So far I have seen some re-reveals and ... umm re-re-reveals?

Now let us see ...

XBox reveal that was not what we thought and a slim version coming in a few months and the more powerful rumoured one coming in a year?! Hmm yeeeah think that out paid to all the Polaris rumours as I now cannot see Polaris as we know it being used in a console that is still twelve months away?

Polaris is out imminently, more versions in a few months along with Vega between October 2016 and January 2017. By this time next year we would have had a whole gamut of Polaris and several Vega versions out and everyone will be talking and speculating about Navi.

Though they could go the dual Polaris route I guess by then?

Sony said nothing about their consoles despite Microsoft announcing two.

Still nice t have it confirmed even if I never took part in the slabs of plastic since the Atari 2600!

Games?

Mass Effect Andromeda ... again. More footage, looks good.

Battlefield 1 we knew about.

Ghost Recon Wildlands ... again.

For Honor ... again.

Horizon Zero Dawn ... again and not on PC anyway.

State of Decay 2 ... oh OK that looked cool ... but it is zombies ... yet again. Have they ran out of ideas? Lol.

Titanfall 2 we knew about but its single player makes it semi-interesting.

Dishonored ... again and this one I am waiting for.

Elder Scrolls 6 being worked on .... well, duh!

Elder Scrolls Skyrim ... again ... wait, what?!

Resident Evil 7 ... again ... but with a full name and probably not on PC.

Star Wars game we are still only aware of the fact it is a Star Wars game ... again.

FIFA 17 ... yawn! Wait ... it has a what?!

Madden ... at least I understand football ... sorry I mean soccer.

Quake ... again, oh cool but I think it will probably turn out to be Quake Arena ... again.

Prey ... again. Wait ... thought this was cancelled? Now it looks one of the two interesting games announced at E3 this year?

Gears Of War 4 again.

Was there a Gods Of War or something?

Scalebound ... again.

Dead Rising 4. OK sort of interesting and new but it is the 'Z' word for the millionth time.

Gwent... umm Gwent?! Running 750 watt system for a ... CARD GAME?! Yeah right, next!

Tekken ... YAWN!

Just Dance ... oh for the love of ...

Watchdogs 2 we knew about and hopefully will be better received than the last one?

Detroit Become Human again but looks damn interesting ... oooh wait ... yeeeah not on PC, lol.

Call Of Duty again, again, again.

Some interesting sounding VR titles like the Batman one and X-Wing.

Crash Ban... oh why bother, lol.

Farpoint I did not see much about ... probably a console exclusive?

Might have missed a few and I hope some people have at least been excited by the announcements but it has not really done much for me thus far.

Hopefully there might be one or two things before it finishes?

Sunday 5 June 2016

THE NEW AGE OF GAMES

Ugh!

I really am not up to typing this out as I am ill. I took receipt of two very nice Vape juices and within a couple of hours I was going down with my first does of the flu for a few years! Typical.

I have been wading through the Internet and YouTube as there are now announcements regarding AMD's Polaris, even brief one of Zen, and nVidia's Pascal coming thick and fast!

Only ... it has been a little odd, I am not the only one to have noticed and I am now wondering whether or not people are actually going to wake up to being fooled as well as being misled?

Basically nVidia announced there cards and everyone went nuts. Except I thought the cards sounded complete shite, many people missed an important point but some did spot it.

In fact I sometimes wonder to people's sanity and their own self proclaimed levels of intelligence as I have seen many arguments with the typical nVidia fanboys stating "The 1080 is 2.5 times the power of the 980!" Or they stated the 980Ti, cannot remember, does not matter ... because no it does not!

I wanted to chuckle each time someone then replied with "Nooo! It is 2.5x the performance in Virtual Reality, did you even WATCH the video?!" LMAO!

But then once corrected they are harping on about the actual 30% increase in power, so wwe have moved 150% to 30% or 2.5 times to 0.33 times the power.

Umm ... did anyone note the insane clocks?

A node shrink and insane clocks? I am sorry but I expected a fair bit more than that to be honest and I thought it would be in excess of 50% at the very least.

Oh yeah, and the node shrink? Absolutely everyone completely forgot about one other thing regarding node shrinks that it seemed nVidia forgot all about too?!

It wont be to scale but as an example 14nm is half the size of 28nm. They pay for the wafers used to grow chips so for the same money they get, theoretically but like I said not quite to scale, double thee amount.

This equates to being half the price of the previous equivalent chips. NOT far more expensive!

Yet there will be these morons that think themselves sooo smart that will fight tooth and nail to defend nVidia while being taken advantage of while their back is turned that they might as well bend over and drop their pants!

These same people were also bitching about AMD's Polaris chip and how it needs to be less than $300?! A chip no one has tested. Jesus Christ, do these people even HEAR themselves?! Do they even read back the utter tripe they type?!

So when I then saw a headline in a report that stated that AMD have just announced $200 for their Polaris 10 card I was ... taken aback and laughing like a drain! Hmm, why do we say that? Drains do not laugh, lol.

So all these morons would finally shut the hell up as the Polaris is not only cheaper than the £300 they harped on about but was a whole $100 cheaper than that? Umm ... welllllll .... noooo...

You see now what they are saying is that the card must be absolute shit to be priced that cheap ... despite the fact that AMD have clearly iterated and re-iterated many times that they were going to release the cards cheap, get VR to the masses and that everyone would be shocked.

Nope! The small minded fanboys who have no life popping off to anyone to get a rise out of them with all their spelling mistakes ad typos still troll around the Internet looking for someone or something they want to disagree with.

I will give you a little info ... I have lost count at the number of times I have wanted to reply and rip the living daylights out of these people and I ... resist. I think, no, no don't. They think they are smart but they are not and will not listen because they actually believe that their deductions are so good that they are both immediate and infallible. You cannot help nor educate people like that just let them go off and blow that same old trumpet.

All they succeed in doing is leaving one hell of a trail on the Internet that can be traced back for bloody eons proving over and over again that they are small minded fools.

But ... Polaris being $200? Wow, not even I expected that!

I am very interested to see how it benchmarks, with what drivers and if they are stable or not, as this might give us an insight into the faster cards from AMD coming between October and early 2017.

I like the idea of them moving the 'X' moniker to after the 'R' and doing away with the '9' and '7' as it was stupid and confused less tech savvy people. Oddly everyone is still expecting a Radeon RX-480X. Maybe a X Series Radeon RXX-480XXX? LMFAO.

I am expecting an RX-490 and two Fury cards and all based on Vega. You were told about Polaris 10 and 11 and have now been shown them and told when. Next is Vega.

I cannot remember now, was there a 470 mentioned?

I had noted that the compute units had dropped in number from the R9-390 which was interesting. I realised that there is a large area for increases in these CU's to 9 increase in number. A very large area and you just know that the top Vega will have more of them than thee Fiji chips? I feel pretty confident about this.

Hmm ... unless that ends up being the Navi chip?

At the end of the day they will both have to space out the increases in power, compute units and chip sizes until it is time to move on from both 14 and 16 nanometres and likely onto 10 nanometres?

Do this too quickly by competing too much and you end up with things being squeezed in without the proper engineering and you know what happens then, right? Things get too hot ... oooh wait a minute?!

Another things that everyone noticed very quickly was that when nVidia made their announcement o their 1070 and 1080 cards the Internet and YouTube was awash with them.

You could not move for all the videos and all the convenient memories of tech journalist fanboys, or on the payroll, for crap about how brilliant the 1070 and 1080 was. I was furious at the over use of the "2.5x" which was a load of shit and quite deliberately misleading.

AMD have an announcement and you would be doing damn well if you heard any of those same journalists so much as break wind!

Luckily and quite fortunately I was far from being the only one that noticed this.

Sorry but I think that being paid off is not only completely immoral it is the very basis for how corruption starts and is so rife. It is both expected and hated in equal measure and many times seemingly by equal amounts?

Now all I have to do is chew on my fingernails until October.

What's all that blood? Lol.

Wednesday 1 June 2016

THE QUALCOMM QUANDARY

I am a bit confused.

My smartphone, a Moto G, has need replacing for a fair old while now. It does not register calls quite often, nor texts, the glass has worn patches and the battery ... hmm the battery? Sometimes it goes all night and seems to use no power at all and can be 90% full the next morning and other times it runs out completely?!

Madness.

This morning it was completely off and switched itself on?! Something that should be impossible and this has never occurred with me before with any of my phones, tablets, laptops or desktop computers.

Immediately made me think of how they have stated that those agencies that would spy on you can actually turn your phones on. When I heard this I thought it was pure hogwash. Yes they could turn things on and off as long as your phone was on, like listening in on the microphone or watching things your camera lens can see, but not turn it on when it is actually off!

Anyhoo ...

I now have two extra cameras that can link up to my phone and along with the fact it has become erratic in its behaviour and decides whether or not to register or even let through phone calls and texts I am limited to 8GB of memory and no SD Card slot.

There are lots of apps I had previously for cycling, maps and all manner of things. But I had to keep this to a minimum. I also used to use my main phone for recording things too. Cannot do that on the Moto G as it dos not have the memory.

So I need something that is waterproof, has far bigger memory, SD card slot and with a better battery.

I have had an eye on a Moto X Force and this is the only one that does everything I want it to...

Except...I am hearing that thee SnapDragon 810 processor tends to overheat, though idiots blame Motorola for this and it is not their fault.

So I looked for the 810's replacement as it might end up running cooler as well as more powerful and this could be combined with a shrink in the chip's lithography.

Enter stage left the SnapDragon 820 ... umm ... except ...

I was just reading a weird report that both shocked me and then confused me and it amazes me these journalists get paid to write some of their stuff.


  • First off whereas the SnapDragon 810 is an Octa-Core chip, it has 8 cores or processors in one, the follow up 820 is only a quad core?!
  • They state that they have gone backwards, first I have ever known this to happen in tech, as it will run cooler and the operating systems and apps were not coded to run on a core or two?!

Do you see the deliberate mistake here? It does not add up! Because ....

  • Either they are telling the truth, apps and OS's were only running on a couple of cores in which case the chip is utter tripe as it was overheating therefore you were paying for an octa-core chip that actually did not even qualify as a hexa-core, 6 cores, chip. (i.e. over heating with 2 or 4 cores means it is not capable of running as a 6 or 8 core CPU)
  • They are lying and I have only just discovered recently that Mediatek have a 10, yup that is TEN, core chip! This suggests they are indeed lying.
  • At the end of the day each process running in the background will use a core and for me it is not unusual to have 3 or 4 apps running and the operating system, Android/iOS/Windows, to run on an absolute minimum of 2 cores and should use 3 or 4
  • Full Windows and other Operating Systems like Linux and MacOS and software like that used in 3D Modelling, like 3D Studio Max and Soft Image will use as many cores as you can throw at them ... LITERALLY!
  • What is going on as the above have done this for a decade and yet I ma hearing gamers constantly state you do not need more than 2 cores, I disagree on that number, and now SnapDragon claiming phones only using a couple of cores?!

CRAP!!

Now what do you do?

Sorry but concurrent programming is not impossible, it might be difficult but that is why they earn the big bucks, and has been going on for whet feels like a lifetime and in a few years may well be.

If, however, you have a load of new programmers/coders that do not have the tech know how but produce a slow app, game or programme but want the money that 'AAA' and Professional stuff commands ... sorry but, NO!

When they do this and then try the pay to win or use crap I really get irate and want to contact them and call them some choice names while ripping the crap out of their abilities, lmao.

Hopefully I will find out what the truth is before long, figure out if I need to look at Mediatek's ten core chip, as I am fed up with phones slowing down or looking like crap after 5 minutes.

Good God, finding a phone that is suitable is worse than ever!

I wouldn't mind but I do not even have anyone to bloody well phone! LMAO!

I liked the sound of WileyFox, Honor 7, Huawei's latest ones ... oooh wait is that the Honor? Lol. Motorola with the Moto X's and I have always loved LG's flagships ... just that they are not waterproof.

Samsung Galaxy S7? Yup, nice but like iPhones its an idiots amount of money! Those phones should be no more than £400 as that is all they are worth and cost a little over a qaurter of their asking price to be made.

I hhave stated before I am not a gig fan of Apple's stuff either, except their laptops albeit still overpriced.

To me Apple eis a fashion item and your paying them for the name. Sorry but only a self lobotomy what allow me to pay over the tops money by almost double the amount so that I have the word 'Apple' printed on it somewhere.

I think iOS is bland and dated looking too. Just an app tray and I have seen friend's phones with dozens and dozens of apps and it looks an absolute mess. When helping them with their phones its a nightmare trying to locate apps on the phones, lol.

As the memory gets bigger this will obviously get worse still.


http://www.trustedreviews.com/opinions/snapdragon-820-vs-snapdragon-810