HW News - RAM in the CPU, ASUS Block Corrosion Problems, AMD FSR Goes Open
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Date: 2023-02-26
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Comments and reviews: 15
Jamie
The external GPU box is super interesting. I didn t realise they where still in the market since Apple dropped Mac support for eGPU with Apple silicon and that seemed to account for much of the volume a few years ago.
The box looks really useful. I could see the external GPU box potentially appealing to folks who can t fit an RTX 40 series card in their case. Adding in a Thunderbolt card and going external might give some useful options, albeit at a higher price than rebuilding the system in a new case.
It may also be useful for rendering / AI work. Those applications don t stress PCI connectivity as much.
I do a lot of work in the financial crime detection space. While our main toolset is CPU based, I could see a box like this being invested in to support prototyping work on migrating some of the pipeline to CUDA.
I m glad you mentioned the travel issues for hardware. A few years ago I was working on an R&D project for the BBC investigating the accessibility barriers in XR/VR.
We traveled around working with hundreds of disabled users. Using any form of public transport with several pelicases of kit was a massive pain. It was so frustrating we d sometimes post hardware via UPS / DPD rather than try to take it with us on trains / planes etc.
The external GPU may have been a good fit for that project. It might handle being posted around more reliably than a desktop system and less likely to be stolen.
As a final thought, in the UK there are different tax handling rules for computer components versus accessories. If the external GPU was considered an accessory, it could work out 30-40% cheaper for a business to purchase one.
Hope these are all useful to share.
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The external GPU box is super interesting. I didn t realise they where still in the market since Apple dropped Mac support for eGPU with Apple silicon and that seemed to account for much of the volume a few years ago.
The box looks really useful. I could see the external GPU box potentially appealing to folks who can t fit an RTX 40 series card in their case. Adding in a Thunderbolt card and going external might give some useful options, albeit at a higher price than rebuilding the system in a new case.
It may also be useful for rendering / AI work. Those applications don t stress PCI connectivity as much.
I do a lot of work in the financial crime detection space. While our main toolset is CPU based, I could see a box like this being invested in to support prototyping work on migrating some of the pipeline to CUDA.
I m glad you mentioned the travel issues for hardware. A few years ago I was working on an R&D project for the BBC investigating the accessibility barriers in XR/VR.
We traveled around working with hundreds of disabled users. Using any form of public transport with several pelicases of kit was a massive pain. It was so frustrating we d sometimes post hardware via UPS / DPD rather than try to take it with us on trains / planes etc.
The external GPU may have been a good fit for that project. It might handle being posted around more reliably than a desktop system and less likely to be stolen.
As a final thought, in the UK there are different tax handling rules for computer components versus accessories. If the external GPU was considered an accessory, it could work out 30-40% cheaper for a business to purchase one.
Hope these are all useful to share.
reply
Lime
Do you guys think there is a major issue with game optimization these days? Apart from the fact that many games are releasing in outright broken states (like Hogwarts legacy and it's atrocious frame drops), it feels like many games these days are a lot harder to run than their graphics warrant. Games like Sea of Thieves look absolutely fantastic, with a highly stylized look and fantastic water simulation, and the game runs really well. Conversely a lot of modern titles seem to bring my 3080 to its knees for graphics that don't look all that much better.
Is this just an issues of devs not optimizing like they used to because RAM, VRAM, storage, and processing power are just much more abundant than they used to be. Is this carelessness leading to mistakes, like Modern Warfare's 175 GB file size due to duplicated assets. Or is this truly nesscary to produce the modern level of expected graphical fideliy.
I think that devs needs to focus on the aspects that matter in graphics rather than those have little effect. Good lighting and animation make much more of an impact on the player experience than highly detailed textures, especially when you're playing fast pace FPS games where it's all a blur anyway.
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Do you guys think there is a major issue with game optimization these days? Apart from the fact that many games are releasing in outright broken states (like Hogwarts legacy and it's atrocious frame drops), it feels like many games these days are a lot harder to run than their graphics warrant. Games like Sea of Thieves look absolutely fantastic, with a highly stylized look and fantastic water simulation, and the game runs really well. Conversely a lot of modern titles seem to bring my 3080 to its knees for graphics that don't look all that much better.
Is this just an issues of devs not optimizing like they used to because RAM, VRAM, storage, and processing power are just much more abundant than they used to be. Is this carelessness leading to mistakes, like Modern Warfare's 175 GB file size due to duplicated assets. Or is this truly nesscary to produce the modern level of expected graphical fideliy.
I think that devs needs to focus on the aspects that matter in graphics rather than those have little effect. Good lighting and animation make much more of an impact on the player experience than highly detailed textures, especially when you're playing fast pace FPS games where it's all a blur anyway.
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Lime
Microsoft buying Blizzard both scare my and excites me. Maybe Blizzard will stop having all these scandals, and maybe they'll start using all of their really good IPs to actually make some good new games. On the other side, they've already acquired Bethesda and them snatching up more of the market is kinda scary.
On a side note, as someone who managed to get a 3080 on release (at actual MSRP), I felt like a god for all of like 6 months. Even new games at the time felt like they couldn't really be maxed out on it. Now it hardly feels like I'm keeping pace, nothing seems to be able to run well without some careful tweaking of the settings. Ray tracing in new titles is truly difficult to run on it (although it's questionable whether it's worth it with how bad many implementations have been) without getting wrecked on the FPS side. It just feels like things are moving so fast that anything you buy is almost instantly outdated.
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Microsoft buying Blizzard both scare my and excites me. Maybe Blizzard will stop having all these scandals, and maybe they'll start using all of their really good IPs to actually make some good new games. On the other side, they've already acquired Bethesda and them snatching up more of the market is kinda scary.
On a side note, as someone who managed to get a 3080 on release (at actual MSRP), I felt like a god for all of like 6 months. Even new games at the time felt like they couldn't really be maxed out on it. Now it hardly feels like I'm keeping pace, nothing seems to be able to run well without some careful tweaking of the settings. Ray tracing in new titles is truly difficult to run on it (although it's questionable whether it's worth it with how bad many implementations have been) without getting wrecked on the FPS side. It just feels like things are moving so fast that anything you buy is almost instantly outdated.
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Dale
Hey now Steve, Planetside 2 is still an active game with a decent competition scene, with on average the same number of nightly players as Halo Infinite. It also still benefits from modern GPUs power in terms of FPS increase to the average player, with my 2080ti still grinding to under 90FPS in some large fights (and its OC puts it between an RTX Titan and RTX 3080 in performance). One of my friends bought a 4090 to get more FPS for 4k gaming in it. I could definitely see people with slower RTX cards turning on DLSS for the FPS gains in it. They added FSR in the same update as well. Rather impressive for a game that started its life on DirectX 9C
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Hey now Steve, Planetside 2 is still an active game with a decent competition scene, with on average the same number of nightly players as Halo Infinite. It also still benefits from modern GPUs power in terms of FPS increase to the average player, with my 2080ti still grinding to under 90FPS in some large fights (and its OC puts it between an RTX Titan and RTX 3080 in performance). One of my friends bought a 4090 to get more FPS for 4k gaming in it. I could definitely see people with slower RTX cards turning on DLSS for the FPS gains in it. They added FSR in the same update as well. Rather impressive for a game that started its life on DirectX 9C
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Crihnoss
I'm so done with Asus. The last 3 products I bought the 3 have unfixable, unforgivable problems.
Laptop: instead of thermal throttling BY 300 mhz it throttles TO 300mhz turning whatever I'm doing into a PowerPoint presentation for a couple of seconds.
No fix.
Monitor: dead pixels. Not enough to qualify for a replacement
Motherboard: design flaw that causes audio lag in windows if the ARGB lighting is on. No fix.
Random audio corruptions for no reason. It's all the ALC 4080's fault.
At least I go a refund for this one.
But F them. I'm done.
Shame, because my old 970 strix was one of the best video cards I ever owned.
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I'm so done with Asus. The last 3 products I bought the 3 have unfixable, unforgivable problems.
Laptop: instead of thermal throttling BY 300 mhz it throttles TO 300mhz turning whatever I'm doing into a PowerPoint presentation for a couple of seconds.
No fix.
Monitor: dead pixels. Not enough to qualify for a replacement
Motherboard: design flaw that causes audio lag in windows if the ARGB lighting is on. No fix.
Random audio corruptions for no reason. It's all the ALC 4080's fault.
At least I go a refund for this one.
But F them. I'm done.
Shame, because my old 970 strix was one of the best video cards I ever owned.
reply
Pliash
Videos on electro plating.
Not needed, done that and chrome plating for a few years, pretty much skilled or experienced in any form of surface treatment.
You always want to run corrosion inhibitors in your coolant even if its by no means a fix it all, CUZ galvanic corrosion are a SOB in most cases.
Sacrificial Zink blocks on a ships hull, well pretty nifty to have them corrode instead of the ship hull.
I am not talking about the weight of the 4 cobber radiators for my next build. Fortunate the build are not meant to be light weight, actually it is a 2 person lift or roll it on casters if possible.
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Videos on electro plating.
Not needed, done that and chrome plating for a few years, pretty much skilled or experienced in any form of surface treatment.
You always want to run corrosion inhibitors in your coolant even if its by no means a fix it all, CUZ galvanic corrosion are a SOB in most cases.
Sacrificial Zink blocks on a ships hull, well pretty nifty to have them corrode instead of the ship hull.
I am not talking about the weight of the 4 cobber radiators for my next build. Fortunate the build are not meant to be light weight, actually it is a 2 person lift or roll it on casters if possible.
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ninepoints
Hey GN! FYI, AMD's FSR was always part of the GPU open project (and has shipped in several titles as an open source integration). The 2.1 and 2.2 updates are updates to 2.0 which was also released as open source in the middle of 2022. The 2.1 update uses Farming Simulator as the demo because while high-velocity motion can be the cause of ghosting, the big issue prior to 2.1 was specifically ghosting for thin features which are temporally unstable in the presence of the per-frame TAA jitter. (The thin rakes at the rear portion of the tractor were the main thing to pay attention to).
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Hey GN! FYI, AMD's FSR was always part of the GPU open project (and has shipped in several titles as an open source integration). The 2.1 and 2.2 updates are updates to 2.0 which was also released as open source in the middle of 2022. The 2.1 update uses Farming Simulator as the demo because while high-velocity motion can be the cause of ghosting, the big issue prior to 2.1 was specifically ghosting for thin features which are temporally unstable in the presence of the per-frame TAA jitter. (The thin rakes at the rear portion of the tractor were the main thing to pay attention to).
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Why
I don't think embedded DRAM means no RAM upgradability, except maybe in small motherboards/systems. Even if DIMMs disappear, CXL PCIe RAM modules are coming too. Coordinating more levels of memory could be tricky, but for easier compatibility I guess the first one could be treated as another cache level(like with HBM on Xeons) and the last one as virtual memory maybe? Currently getting RAM to run at its highest performance level on your system is, from what I gather, far from guaranteed, so I'm looking forward to gaming-focused CPUs cutting out this complication.
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I don't think embedded DRAM means no RAM upgradability, except maybe in small motherboards/systems. Even if DIMMs disappear, CXL PCIe RAM modules are coming too. Coordinating more levels of memory could be tricky, but for easier compatibility I guess the first one could be treated as another cache level(like with HBM on Xeons) and the last one as virtual memory maybe? Currently getting RAM to run at its highest performance level on your system is, from what I gather, far from guaranteed, so I'm looking forward to gaming-focused CPUs cutting out this complication.
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Lucas
Electroless Nickel is pretty much necessary to plate between those fins. There's no way you would get nickel between those fins with electroplating without overplating the rest of the part.
EK is probably getting ahead of this because they don't want to get blamed for an obvious oversight that they probably warned the silly ASUS engineers about. But yeah, engineers usually get what they want, and the customer is always right.... It could be on EK, I just find that hard to believe when they themselves explicitly warn about this all over their website.
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Electroless Nickel is pretty much necessary to plate between those fins. There's no way you would get nickel between those fins with electroplating without overplating the rest of the part.
EK is probably getting ahead of this because they don't want to get blamed for an obvious oversight that they probably warned the silly ASUS engineers about. But yeah, engineers usually get what they want, and the customer is always right.... It could be on EK, I just find that hard to believe when they themselves explicitly warn about this all over their website.
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Elijs
Stacking more and more DRAM on top of the processing layer / interconnects in the CPU is really interesting - and obviously works very well for cache, so why not DRAM too - but... doesn't all this stacking have negative implications on heat dispersion? The 5800x3d is already more difficult to cool than the 5800, and that's with a single added layer of cache on top of parts of the cpu compute layer. If AMD goes like they imply in the graphic and add several layers of dram over the cpu compute layer, wouldn't those dram layers get basically baked?
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Stacking more and more DRAM on top of the processing layer / interconnects in the CPU is really interesting - and obviously works very well for cache, so why not DRAM too - but... doesn't all this stacking have negative implications on heat dispersion? The 5800x3d is already more difficult to cool than the 5800, and that's with a single added layer of cache on top of parts of the cpu compute layer. If AMD goes like they imply in the graphic and add several layers of dram over the cpu compute layer, wouldn't those dram layers get basically baked?
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Sav
At this point, there have been more than a few watercooling issues. Pure headache. Extra cost, maintenance, difficulty of installation, PITA every single time you have to do maintenance in the future... Watercooling still doesn't have me convinced the pros outweigh the cons - not while issues like this are coming up between reputable manufacturers. Especially if your house is temperature controlled, never have to worry about thermals on your PC. Is it really worth adding 1k to the cost of your computer??
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At this point, there have been more than a few watercooling issues. Pure headache. Extra cost, maintenance, difficulty of installation, PITA every single time you have to do maintenance in the future... Watercooling still doesn't have me convinced the pros outweigh the cons - not while issues like this are coming up between reputable manufacturers. Especially if your house is temperature controlled, never have to worry about thermals on your PC. Is it really worth adding 1k to the cost of your computer??
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Ingwie
With the absurdly fast rise of handheld PCs, eGPU enclosures are bound to become a bigger topic. I am eying to buy a GPD Win 4 and thought of using an eGPU to plop my old 2080 TI into it, allowing me to play on the higher end when I am connected to my TV. But there doesn't seem to be a lot of eGPU benchmarks or other testing data, unfortunately. Like how well do games work over thunderbolt, which GPUs are much more fine in the context of a Thunderbolt limited connection? Would be neat stuff.
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With the absurdly fast rise of handheld PCs, eGPU enclosures are bound to become a bigger topic. I am eying to buy a GPD Win 4 and thought of using an eGPU to plop my old 2080 TI into it, allowing me to play on the higher end when I am connected to my TV. But there doesn't seem to be a lot of eGPU benchmarks or other testing data, unfortunately. Like how well do games work over thunderbolt, which GPUs are much more fine in the context of a Thunderbolt limited connection? Would be neat stuff.
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Danny
Ah, electroless plating... get the complex compound mixture wrong, or worse, get the complex compound to reducing agent mixture wrong, and plating will be incomplete, or worse, will completely lose adhesion over a short time, moreso than with electroplating.
Wanting to go green (most common reason, since electroless plating is fairly expensive) is cute, but it's a source of too many issues in this industry.
Plus, the chemical plating produces a metric boatload of pollutants.
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Ah, electroless plating... get the complex compound mixture wrong, or worse, get the complex compound to reducing agent mixture wrong, and plating will be incomplete, or worse, will completely lose adhesion over a short time, moreso than with electroplating.
Wanting to go green (most common reason, since electroless plating is fairly expensive) is cute, but it's a source of too many issues in this industry.
Plus, the chemical plating produces a metric boatload of pollutants.
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BUDA20
new releases with DLSS but NO FSR 2 make no sense, and it seems like the NVIDIA hand making the rounds... MOST people have access only to FSR, and using 1 instead of 2 when there is already compatibility due to DLSS is criminal (yes, you can mod it in pretty much all games EXEPT online games due to Anticheat, and even if it works, there is danger to be banned for it), so... cmon... FSR 2 on every game that at least have DLSS, cover all your players... not only a few
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new releases with DLSS but NO FSR 2 make no sense, and it seems like the NVIDIA hand making the rounds... MOST people have access only to FSR, and using 1 instead of 2 when there is already compatibility due to DLSS is criminal (yes, you can mod it in pretty much all games EXEPT online games due to Anticheat, and even if it works, there is danger to be banned for it), so... cmon... FSR 2 on every game that at least have DLSS, cover all your players... not only a few
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ANeM
The Atomic Heart debacle reminded me of how Dovetails Fishing Sim was first shown alongside Valves SteamVR headset (which became the Vive) and was one of the earliest demos for roomscale VR experiences. There was actually a fair bit of decent press for how immersive it felt to actually be fishing in VR, and then when Dovetail actually released their fishing sim it just didn't have VR. In fact, it still doesn't after like 4 or 5 different entries in the series.
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The Atomic Heart debacle reminded me of how Dovetails Fishing Sim was first shown alongside Valves SteamVR headset (which became the Vive) and was one of the earliest demos for roomscale VR experiences. There was actually a fair bit of decent press for how immersive it felt to actually be fishing in VR, and then when Dovetail actually released their fishing sim it just didn't have VR. In fact, it still doesn't after like 4 or 5 different entries in the series.
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