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Talk Amongst Yourselves
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65 responses to “Talk Amongst Yourselves”
Adventures in backlog update: Diddy Kong Racing has been officially beaten (I don’t have the patience to play through adventure 2 or unlock T.T). Along with a playthrough of IMSCARED, my total number of completed games this year is now 15.
My current playing list involves: Breath of the Wild, No Man’s Sky, Kingdom Hearts and Danganronpa 2. Since everything I’m playing is a bit up there in play hours, I don’t expect to reach number 16 for a while.
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I’m working through Just Cause 3 myself. I trailed off and left it unfinished when it came out, but it’s great fun going back to it now (with a new playthrough, of course). Especially what with Just Cause 4 announced, gotta make sure I’m up to date.
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>I don’t have the patience to play through adventure 2 or unlock T.T
Guess it hasn’t officially been beaten. 😉Adventure 2 was mirror mode, right? I remember beating that (and getting T.T) as a wee lad.
Years later, I couldn’t even beat Wizpig, so I did it at the right time I think.-
Not going to lie, I save scammed my way through Wiz Pig, even as a kid, I couldn’t get close to finishing that game. After having the game for 20 years, I cut myself some slack.
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The Just Cause series is one that I really want to, but just haven’t clicked with yet. I played a few hours of the second one, and the destruction mechanics were really fun, but I didn’t
Connect with it narratively, so I put it down pretty quickly. I might pick up a title on PC next time I see it on deep discount.
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Just Cause is basically an 80s action movie put to video game. If you approach it from that mindset it’s an amazingly fun experience.
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There’s nothing quite as satisfying as destroying a flying helicopter by tethering a jeep to it.
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Never finished a Just Cause but I do go back to 3 for a bit of wanton destruction now and again. 🙂
Not surprised Ign fired Filip, it was such a dodgy review with not only plagiarism, but also misinformation. Feels bad because I liked him, but he dropped the ball pretty hard.
So, I bought Picross S2 last fortnight and I’ve almost finished it already. Except I’m not bothering with Mega picross cause I hate it.
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*swoon*
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As usual, I have done some reading but it never hurts to ask here as well.
With the new nVidia cards on the horizon, I’m thinking of a small tweak to my own system. I’m no professional gamer but I do like to tinker from time to time.
I currently have the following in my system:
* 16 GB of DDR4 RAM
* A GTX1070 8GB as my GPU
* A GTX960 2GB as a PhysX card
I’m honestly thinking of another GTX1070 8GB to do some SLi.
Thing is, do I also need to upgrade the RAM?
I don’t know if this is old medicine now but I still go by the rule that GPU RAM gets mapped to PC RAM thus one needs to have at least 4 GB on top of the combined GPU RAM.
While yes I know I probably could get a GTX 1080 now, but to keep the variables down, I’d like to gauge if SLi for me now is even possible given my RAM.
Thanks in advance.
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SLI is really not that great an improvement as most games just don’t have great multiGPU scaling. Unless you find a very cheap 1070 second hand, or you’re playing games that you know do have good SLI improvements, I wouldn’t bother.
https://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/2474-gtx-1070-sli-benchmark-vs-gtx-1080-and-gtx-1070/page-2My advice, save the pennies for now and wait for the new cards. 🙂 I almost got a 980Ti but thought to check and wound up waiting 2 months, using extra 2 months savings and went straight to 1080FE from a GTX680.
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My advice, save the pennies for now and wait for the new cards
I have thought of that as well. I’m just trying to canvas both angles and make sure my knowledge is current.
But if I may pick your brain for a moment longer.
If I do decided to get another 1070 (for discussion sake), will I need more RAM?
I remember back in the day, the GPU RAM got mapped to physical RAM. Is that still the case or is that knowledge obsolete now?
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That’s a great question… and I genuinely don’t know the answer, mainly because since I put 24GB in my (triple channel) machine 9 years ago, it’s been moot. 🙂
I’ll have a look and get back to you.
Out of interest, how’s your RAM configured now? Pair of 8s with 2 spare slots, or would you have to replace 4 x 4GBs with 4 x 8GBs?
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…looks like that was back in the 32bit OS days and due to addressing limitations. So it shouldn’t be a concern with a 64bit OS.
Even so, if RAM’s cheap, why the hell not. 😀
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First, thanks for the advice. I might sit a while longer to see what happens post August 20.
If the price collapses I’ll decide for another 1070 or two 1080s.
But in terms of my RAM situation, I have four sticks of 4 GB.
In truth I had thought about going to 32 GB of RAM, but just getting two 8 GB sticks and just moving to 24 GB might actually make far more sense.
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I have 6 4GB sticks. X58 motherboard.
Single 1080 does me fine – 3440×1440 made Rise of the Tomb Raider stunning… 😀
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Will still keep that in mind. August 20 is only a few days away so I’ll see what happens first (if there is a fire sale or whatever).
Truth be told, my current 1070 is holding up well. But I do wonder home much of that is because I have a 960 doing the PhysX work.
Both are the G1 Gaming variety from Gigabyte. And this is where I bow out before the laughter gets too much.
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Nowt wrong with GigaByte – my venerable X58 mobo (over 10 years old) is a Gigabyte, as is my GTX680 and GTX1080.
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With SLI, you only get access to ONE gpu’s VRAM, so forget any dreams you had of getting access to more texture space etc. The only thing SLI will do for you, is increase the processing speed a bit. How much? Impossible to say without trying, but don’t expect anywhere near double. You’ll probably be lucky to see an increase of 5-10fps.
So yeah, with that in mind, you shouldn’t NEED more system ram, but more system ram never really hurts either. I think from memory nvidia only has a minimum requirement of 2 or 4gb for SLI, but they recommend 12 for 64 bit systems.
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First, thank you for responding. Especially given your health. I hope all is well on that front.
Second, my background is in distributed computing. So yeah, I certainly know double the resources doesn’t mean double the performance.
[Shudders over memories of OpenMPI and the ears that bloody compiler put me through]
With SLI, you only get access to ONE gpu’s VRAM
As in only the memory of one card is in use or is the data cloned on both cards?
Regardless of the outcome, again, thank you.
Truth be told, while there maybe some gaming benefit, I just wanted to have some fun with some CUDA.
Despite my nightmare listed above, I do miss the challenge of getting a distributed program to work on a given hardware configuration.
With some card prices falling already with August 20 arriving, I’m just waiting a few more days to see what comes out.
I’m not sold on the RTX now. I’m waiting for the later generations as the first always have issues.
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Correct. Only the memory of the primary card is in use. The vram on the second card is dead space in an SLI setup (with SLI enabled anyway).
If you disable SLI, you can utilize the memory for doing CUDA calcs or physx or whatever as like a dedicated card kind of thing, but with SLI enabled, primary vram is all you have, and each card attempts to render about 50% of each frame simultaneously, but usually the primary will end up doing 60-75, and the remainder on the secondary.
If you do a lot of CUDA stuff, it’s probably worth just running the secondary as a dedicated processor for it, but otherwise, unless your FPS is just that annoying little bit too low, it’s not worth the extra cost tbh. If you happen to have 2 of the same cards, you might as well, but definitely not worth the purchase/running cost just for SLI. 🙂
As for my health, not really all that well yet, but if all goes well, the end should be nigh! Fingers crossed anyway 🙂
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I wouldn’t bother with SLI. It’s a bit more power but it introduces a lot of other issues like microstuttering. Instead if you had to upgrade I’d look at a 1080 Ti to replace the 1070, or wait for the 2080 – rumor mill is that the next gen cards are going to be announced imminently, possibly on the 20th.
16gb is fine, especially DDR4. I assume that if you’re rocking DDR4 you’ve also got a recent CPU – if not, I’d look at upgrades there instead. The newest intel CPU line from intel has extra cores as well as a speed increase. But you probably don’t need it. You theoretically *could* upgrade to 32gb and it definitely wouldn’t hurt, but I don’t think you’d gain much unless performance tests suggest your card is being bottlenecked feeding data from system memory to the video card or you’re seeing virtual memory cache thrashing a lot.
It really comes down to what you’re doing. Are you using this for games or for something more advanced like rendering or video editing? Are you streaming? Compiling complicated code?
I don’t know if this is old medicine now but I still go by the rule that GPU RAM gets mapped to PC RAM
That’s definitely not how VRAM works on modern machines. Maybe on *NIX where you can mmap() the VRAM to have direct access, but mapping the GPU memory into the physical address space sounds more like something from the old days of computing, like on the C64 or similar.
The limitation back in the day (and anything still using DirectX 9 will have this limitation still, even on 64-bit) is that stuff in VRAM also has to exist in physical RAM, which is limited to 2gb on a 32-bit program, so it can use at most 2gb of VRAM. I believe the way it works on a 64bit OS using DirectX 10/11, video RAM is virtualized the same way as physical, so it can use 100% of it, and if you don’t have enough VRAM it will actually use system RAM – basically the same way that if your system doesn’t have enough RAM, it’ll use your HDD as extra virtual space, except the VRAM is virtualized into System RAM.
But the “you should have more system ram than your GPU RAM + 4gb” rule you stated is something I’ve never heard before.
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Isn’t really a case of having to upgrade. This is just pure amusement and some CUDA play.
But given that some prices are falling (the 1070 I was looking at last night just went on sale for $80 less to $620) I’m still waiting for August 20 to roll around.
I assume that if you’re rocking DDR4 you’ve also got a recent CPU – if not, I’d look at upgrades there instead.
Hm…. I don’t think my CPU is recent in any stretch of the word. It’s a 6700K. But it’s still a good CPU (at least for me) but it has to be getting pretty old now.
The limitation back in the day (and anything still using DirectX 9 will have this limitation still, even on 64-bit) is that stuff in VRAM also has to exist in physical RAM
Yeap, that was the time period where that rule got ingrained in my head. But based on what has been said here and what I read online, that rule no longer applies.
Thanks though. I’m mostly a console gamer (install game, have fun, forget game exists) so things easy shift through multiple generations by the time I get around to thinking of upping my existing PC.
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6700K is perfectly fine – only really two gens behind. I’m still using a 4670K and aside from struggling with Assassin’s Creegypt because of their fucked up DRM that they swear wasn’t chewing the CPU but it absolutely was, it’s handled everything I’ve thrown at it fine. Starting to lean toward an upgrade soon but not feeling much urgency yet. The 6-core Coffee Lake processors are tempting but I’m thinking it’s best to hold out for the 9xxx series just so the hardware is free of Specte / Meltdown vulnerabilities (I’ve hard the microcode updates for Coffee Lake are unstable)
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I’m still using a 4670K and aside from struggling with Assassin’s Creegypt because of their fucked up DRM that they swear wasn’t chewing the CPU but it absolutely was
So that’s the real market for the new AMD CPUs. 4 cores for the game, 18 for the DRM, X-P
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Something that I haven’t seen covered in Kotaku is that THQ Nordic bought the Timesplitters IP this week. As someone who has been waiting patiently for Timesplitters 4, this news makes me super happy.
Also: Nintendo announced Taiko No Tatsujin: Drum n Fun will be released on Switch in November, with up to four player multiplayer. Time to relive so Japan memories!
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I have this huge pile of Switch games and I’ve played exactly one of them to completion, and only recently. Keep buying stuff that I would like *in theory* but I don’t get to them.
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I have been completing them, which is more then I did on PC.
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