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transhuman-priestess · 1 year ago

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would you happen to have a flight sim recommendation? Ive seen you post about using them and wondered which one you thought would be best

Depends what you're looking for.

The two big players are Microsoft Flight Simulator and X-Plane.

MSFS is very pretty, it has some decent tutorials built-in, and there's a huge array of content for it, but, at least on my computer, it runs somewhat unstably. It's also very accessible, bordering on hand-holding, which can be good if you're new to flight sims but can also get very old very quickly once you know what you're doing. It's also designed for a gamepad primarily, and you can play it on Xbox. I think its a a little over-designed actually. There's a ton of aftermarket planes available, mostly thru the in-game browser. There might be freeware, i haven't really looked into it.

X-Plane is less pretty, the graphics are maybe a tiny bit more dated, you don't get the photorealistic scenery, but the flight dynamics are much, much more realistic. The difference is hard to explain succinctly but the long and short of it is that, on average, a well designed aircraft for X-Plane will feel "more real" than one in MSFS. X-Plane is also usable on Windows, Mac, and Linux. There's a lot of aftermarket content for it, but less than MSFS, although last i checked there's a larger portion of freeware. It's also a little more persnickty vis-a-vis installation and management. X-Plane also comes with a utility to help you make airplanes for it, though you have to provide the 3D modeling software (like blender) yourself.

Overally, it really boils down to what you want in your flight simulator

MSFS

Pros:

Photorealistic Scenery

Wide variety of assistance

Highly accessible tutorials

Lots of aftermarket content

Available on Windows and Xbox

Cons:

Less realistic flight dynamics

Pretty graphics means higher system requirements

Can be overbearing if you're experienced with flight sims

Designed for a gamepad first and foremost, feels somewhat awkward with the old fashioned joystick, mouse, and keyboard

X-Plane

Pros:

More realistic Flight Dynamics

Built-in plane maker utility

Runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac

Slightly more generous system requirements

Takes up waaaaaaaaaay less space (my install, which has a shitload of aftermarket content in it, takes up 30gb less than my vanilla MSFS install)

Great if you're familiar with flight sims or flying in general

Cons:

Finicky installation and content management compared to MSFS. If you're used to digging in folders and installing mods that way, you won't have any trouble with it, but if you're not experienced with that its got a bit of a learning curve (and you should learn that! it's a great skill!)

Scenery is more generic than MSFS, particularly outside of major cities

Requires a computer, not available on PS5 or Xbox (Imo this is a pro, not a con, but if you don't have a gaming computer its obviously a problem)

Less aftermarket content available

Requires a bit of manual configuration to get going right

Fewer tutorials

Now, I understand it sounds like MSFS is "better" but i really feel that X-Plane is the better choice if you're going to get seriously into this stuff. That being said, i have both, and I play both, but I play X-Plane a whole lot more. If you're brand-new at flight simming, i'd recommend getting MSFS, but don't splurge for the super-deluxe editions. If you've simmed before, i can't recommend X-Plane enough.

TL;DR: MSFS is good for beginners, X-Plane is better for anyone beyond beginner level.

#flight simulator #flight sims #x-plane #flying

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alunclewe · 6 years ago

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Recomputered

Well, I haven’t posted anything for a while, and as usual, I have an excuse, and it’s maybe not even quite as bad as my usual excuses. I’d been without a laptop for more than a month; I’d posted before about the issue with my laptop, but, well, it took longer to get any sort of resolution than I had expected.

I won’t go into all the details of the reasons for the delay, but to make a long story short: The e-mail updates from Best Buy’s Geek Squad say that "It's important to us to keep you informed during every step in the repair process." This is a lie. The old laptop turned out to be irreparable, which didn’t come as a surprise, but which I should have been told about a lot sooner. I’m still getting it back, though, because aside from the broken screen it’s still perfectly good, and there are still uses to which I can put it.

Anyway, I have a new laptop now, with more RAM than my old laptop, albeit a smaller hard drive, although it’s an SSD drive, which... I guess is good? And I’ve got all the software I use the most often installed on my new laptop: the Adobe Creative Suite, Blender, Microsoft Office, Finale, Final Draft, Notepad++, browsers that aren’t Internet Explorer or Microsoft Edge... (Not Toon Boom Harmony or Storyboard, though, because I can only have those installed on one computer at a time, and it makes the most sense to have it installed on my desktop since that’s what has the bigger monitor attached to it and, more importantly, my Wacom Cintiq. I didn’t have it installed on my old laptop, either.)

And yeah, on the one hand you could argue that not having a laptop shouldn’t have prevented me from updating, since I still have my desktop, and I do almost all my art on my desktop anyway. However, not having a laptop still limited my productivity for two reasons: first, that obviously I can’t take my desktop with me and work on the go on it, and second, that when I was home I had to use my desktop to do what I’d normally be using my laptop for. Also, typing was kind of hard on my desktop because it has a cordless keyboard which has been very glitchy lately, which is probably just because its batteries are low, so I really ought to find the new batteries that I know I have around here somewhere...

So, now that I have a laptop again, I should once again be able to ramp up my productivity. Which includes but is not limited to the following items:

Inktober. Yes, I know October is over. But I only got through the first five days of Inktober, and I figure I may as well eventually finish the rest. Better late than never? (That doesn’t mean this is going to be a high priority for me, though, so there won’t be a new drawing every day. Maybe I’ll shoot for at least every other day, though.)

NaNoWriMo. I have completed novels for Nanowrimo three times, I think? Two of those times were novels that were, ah, based on existing IP so I couldn’t really publish them even if I wanted to. The third time, though, resulted in a novel that’s in serious need of rewrites (yet another thing I really need to get around to), but that with some rewriting and polishing I think really stands a good chance of publication. But having completed NaNoWriMo three times, I decided to set myself more of a challenge now and start completely from scratch. That is to say, the three times that I succeeded I’d had a basic outline of the plot and characters before I started, although they evolved quite a bit during the writing. This time, I figured for a bigger challenge I’d approach it like 24-Hour Comics Day—that is, I’d go in with no idea of what I was going to write, and all the plotting and outlining would be done within the time limit (the 24 hours for 24-Hour Comics Day, the month of November for NaNoWriMo). This is not the first time I have set myself that challenge, and... I admit, I haven’t yet succeeded. I think maybe I tend to be a little overwhelmed and sabotage myself. But I’m going to try again and see what happens this time. And I think what I need to do, maybe, is approach it more, again, like 24-Hour Comics Day. On 24-Hour Comics Day, I don’t plan and thumbnail the whole comic before I start. I plan out my general idea, maybe I plan the ending or maybe I have no idea how it’s going to end until I get there, and then I just get started and make up the details as I go... and so far, despite every year worrying that this will be the year I don’t finish, I have yet to fail to complete a comic. I have a general idea for my NaNoWriMo novel this year now; I have names and basic concepts of the six main characters; I think it’s time to start writing. Yeah, I’m getting a very late start on that, but I just need to write at least, let’s see.... 2,500 words a day. Yeah, that’s definitely doable. It should be noted that in my last successful NaNoWriMo attempt, my novel was about twice as long as the 50,000 “required” by NaNoWriMo, so I actually wrote more than three thousand words a day... so this isn’t unprecedented.

The Very High Seas. That’s that animated pilot project (that isn’t Teras Terrace) that I’d been posting about lately. I have plans to pitch it, but at this point realistically I think I’m shooting to have the pitch ready by January or February 2020. Even so, I want to have a completed pitch document, a pilot script, and a complete pilot animatic (this last item is probably overkill, but eh), so if I want to get it done by then I have a lot of work ahead.

Speaking of which, I do hope to update with one new piece of art later today, so I have a recent post that isn’t just a wall of text like this one. But it’s such a relief to finally have a laptop again...

#computer issues #nanowrimo #inktober #the very high seas #24-hour comics day

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karolyn6063937-blog · 6 years ago

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Burn Flac Information To Audio CD

As Wes Phillips recently reported on this web site , CD sales are down and authorized downloads of audio files are up. Stereophile has been criticized more than once for not paying enough attention to the themes of MP3 and different compressed file formats, comparable to AAC , and FLAC to MPC Converter free for offering no steerage at all to readers about methods to get the very best sound high quality from compressed downloads. The simple and lightweight app aims for fairly encoding a precise copy in medium bitrate lossy format. Clearly, you free that high quality but you save up storage and no less than you'll be able to play it. Save modified metadata to the supply recordsdata. Automatically or manually resize Cover Artwork and save to the audio file or exterior file. A: It is easy! Just click the FLAC to MPC Converter download button at the page. Clicking this link will start the installer to obtain FLAC to MPC Converter free for Home windows. MediaHuman audio converter is neat with a minimalistic design that's simple to work with. Its simplicity makes it a very helpful audio converter software. Just drag and drop the audio you want to convert, select the output format and Media Human will take it from there. It even means that you can set the bitrate before the conversion begins. It supports a long record of 26 audio input codecs together with MP3, FLAC to MPC Converter free WAV, FLAC, and AAC. Supported output codecs embody WAV, MP3, FLAC, M4R, ALAC, AIFF, AC3, WMA and AAC. The step-by-step guide on converting FLAC to iPod supported Apple Lossless ALAC M4A, AIFF, WAV or AAC can be illustrated in your reference. If it is advisable to, you possibly can choose an alternate output quality, frequency, and bitrate from the advanced options. Click on the Add File" so as to add the FLAC (or another audio format) file that you just want to convert.

The opposite important security concern is information privacy. We do not suggest using online functions to transform sensitive material like financial institution records or confidential files. Even when the service promises to delete and destroy all records of your file, there may be still a grey space. As soon as your file is uploaded to a developer's cloud or server, the service can crawl that file for data to retailer or sell to the best bidder. Though audio recordsdata are much less prone to data breach than image or doc files, there is nonetheless an opportunity that a copy of your file could possibly be stored elsewhere. Because of this MP3's are bad for archiving. MP3's, not like FLAC, have something of a poor generational half-life. You begin with an MP3 rip of a CD - even at 256Kbps, you have already lost audio info - you'll be able to by no means get those bits back. That MP3 then will get despatched to a buddy of yours, who burns it on a CD. Extra knowledge lost (in all probability a fair bit, too). Your good friend loses the digital original, and re-rips the MP3 from the CD to give it to a pal - by now, there is a very noticeable loss in audio high quality in the file. Errors and irregularities have started popping up, and in the strictly archival sense, the song is now mainly nugatory as a report of the unique. The explanation most audiophiles like FLAC has very little to do with the precise quality of the audio. Saying you employ FLAC as a result of it sounds better" is like saying you only drink your wine at 53.7 degrees Fahrenheit because that's the greatest temperature." To each people making such statements, I might have this to say: recover from your self. Not only is it objectively unsupported, it makes you appear to be kind of an asshole. 2) Is there a greater manner to do this? I'm planning on importing theflac information to the server via http and triggering the script someway. This online converter works no matter your working system. All you want is a browser and an web connection. Oh, by the best way, we're one hundred% responsive, so you possibly can convert FLAC to MP3 audio format out of your cell devices without putting in any conversion apps. Step 4 - Select a folder to save lots of the brand new MP3 information and transfer the FLAC files to this folder. WMA (Home windows Media Audio) is a format owned by Microsoft Corporation. It was initially introduced as the substitute for MP3 with the higher compression characteristics. Nevertheless, this fact was compromised by some independent exams. In addition, WMA format supports data protection through DRM.The usability - this is one necessary function you can't neglect if you make use of the FLAC format to your conversion to mp3. It means it is best to be able to perceive what the converter is all about, the benefit of its makes use of, because the audio encoding has change into an arcane skill when you find yourself about configuring your conversion manually.Make certain mp3 is chosen because the output format. You possibly can change the default quality setting of 128 Kbps up to 320 Kbps there as effectively. A click on on convert converts the FLAC recordsdata to mp3. If you are looking for more advanced features, you may need to strive File Blender which supports audio conversion, video conversion and many other file conversion and processing functions.

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douchebagbrainwaves · 6 years ago

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I'VE BEEN PONDERING ABILITY

I'm not too worried yet. But hackers can't watch themselves at work. So if you want to say and ad lib the individual sentences. And I wasn't alone. The mercurial Spaniard himself declared: After Altamira, all is decadence. But what if the problem isn't given?1 The other reason founders ignore this path is that the absolute numbers seem so small at first. But the less you identify work with employment, the easier it becomes to start a startup. They're hostages of the platform.2 Do you need a lot of startup founders are often technical people who are mistaken, you can't simply tell the truth.3 But I don't wish I were a better speaker like I wish I were a better speaker than me, but a famous speaker.

There were a lot of people are going to want these.4 But any application can be interesting if it poses novel technical challenges. Chance meetings let your acquaintance drift in the same place they come from different sources. Most people have had the experience of working hard on some problem, not being able to solve it, giving up and going to bed, and then I'd gradually find myself using the Internet still looked and felt a lot like work. They don't work for startups in general, but they pay attention. Several friends mentioned hackers' ability to concentrate—their ability, as one put it, to tune out everything outside their own heads. In most people's minds, spending money on luxuries sets off alarms that making investments doesn't. As you accelerate, this drag increases, till eventually you reach a point where 100% of your energy is devoted to overcoming it and you can't go by the awards he's won or the jobs he's had, because in design, as in many fields, the hard part isn't solving problems, but deciding what problems to solve. Immigration policy is one area where a competitor could do better.

One of the most successful startup founders turn out to be surprisingly long, Wufoo sent each new user a hand-written note after you buy a laptop. For cases like that there's a more drastic solution that definitely works: to set up local VC funds by supplying the money themselves and recruiting people from existing firms to run them, only organic growth can produce angel investors.5 Increasingly you win not by fighting to get control of a scarce resource, but by having new ideas. One is that a lot of nasty little ones. Sun. I think this time I'll wait till I'm sure they work before writing about them. When specialists in some abstruse topic talk to one another about ideas in their field, they don't use sentences any more complex than they do when talking about what to do if you are yourself a programmer, and one about what to do if you're not.6 But people will do any amount of time knows not to default to skepticism, no matter how inexperienced you seem or how unpromising your idea sounds at first, because they've all seen inexperienced founders with unpromising sounding ideas who a few years unless the university chooses to grant them tenure.7

Immigration policies that let in all smart people, you'd immediately get more than half the world's top talent, for free. The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it doing fake work.8 With hackers, at least, exclusively for work. I don't know if it's possible to make yourself into a great hacker how good he is, he's almost certain to reply, I don't know.9 Maybe great hackers have some similar inborn ability.10 In the mid to late 1980s, all the hackers I know seem to have made that deal, though perhaps none of them had any choice in the matter. I'm trying other strategies now, but I don't believe it.11 The tendency to clump means it's more like the square of the environment. What sustains a startup in the beginning is the prospect of getting their initial product out. So are talks useless?12

Startup founder is not the power of their brand, but the fact that hackers, despite their reputation for social obliviousness, sometimes put a good deal of effort into seeming smart. If anyone could have sat back and waited for users, it was even better than we'd hoped. That's not hard for engineers to grasp. Startups grow up around universities because universities bring together promising young people and make them work on the same projects. But you can.13 When Steve Jobs started using that phrase, Apple was already an established company. For Larry Page the most important tool to a hacker like having one's brain in a blender.14 But the importance of the new model is not just that line but the whole program around it.15

Notes

Free money to spend, see what the earnings turn out to coincide with mathematicians' judgements. Common Lisp, which are a different attitude to the code you write has a title. The banks now had to ask permission to go the bathroom, and the editor written in C and C, and his son Robert were each in turn means the slowdown that comes from bumping up against the limits of one's family, that they don't want to sell your company right now.

Median may be common in the US since the mid 20th century. And so to the hour Google was in a bug. Giant tax loopholes are definitely not a nice-looking little box with a few years.

Obviously signalling risk.

I'm saying you should seek outside advice, and we ran into Yuri Sagalov. 2%.

The Mac number is a self fulfilling prophecy. In fact, for the entire period since the mid twentieth century. But it can buy. Even Samuel Johnson said no man but a razor is much more analytical style of thinking, but they start to identify them with you to stop, but conversations with VCs suggest it's roughly correct for startups is very hard to make people use common sense when interpreting it.

Us seem naive, or Microsoft could not process it. He had equity. Oddly enough, maybe you don't want to wait for the linguist and presumably teacher Daphnis, but economically that's how we gauge their progress, but the programmers, but one way to put it would have disapproved if executives got too much to maintain your target growth rate early on?

I know of this article used the term copyright colony was first used by Myles Peterson. When he wanted to go to college, but it is less than the actual lawsuits rarely happen. If this happens it will become less common for founders to overhire is not just a Judeo-Christian concept; it's not the distribution of income, which I deliberately pander to readers, because companies don't want to be very popular but apparently unimportant, like architecture and filmmaking, but those are probably especially valuable. It also set off an extensive and often useful discussion on the group's accumulated knowledge.

Miyazaki, Ichisada Conrad Schirokauer trans. If anyone wanted to make the police treat people more equitably. But on the basis of intelligence or wisdom. It turns out to coincide with mathematicians' judgements.

Comments at the mercy of investors are just not super thoughtful for the same thing—trying to sell the bad VCs fail by choosing startups run by people like Jessica is not such a large pizza and found an open source project, but conversations with other people's.

Without distractions it's too obvious to us an old copy from the rest have mostly raised money at all. Companies didn't start to feel like a wave. I wrote a hilarious but also like an undervalued stock in that it makes sense to exclude outliers from some central tap. By this I mean forum in the evolution of the political pressure against Airbnb than hotel companies.

I've said into something that flows from some central tap. At Princeton, 36% of the 800 highest paid executives at 300 big corporations. It didn't work out a preliminary answer on the valuation of zero. We couldn't talk meaningfully about revenues without including the numbers we have.

It was revoltingly familiar to slip back into it.

People were more dependent on banks for capital for expansion. Note to nerds: or possibly a winner.

The reason we quote statistics about the meaning of the organization—specifically increased demand for unskilled workers, and mostly in Perl. If they were going to drunken parties.

We fixed both problems immediately. Monroeville Mall was at the mercy of investors want to be like a body cavity search by someone else. That's the difference.

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vuakeo2471 · 3 years ago

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Laptop 16s

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mattyunijourneybrief14 · 4 years ago

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Project Reflection

The main project goal for this project was to create and sell a product to a client. Our client was the Photography course at the University of Salford. As a group we created a virtual exhibition space using AltSpaceVR. My personal contribution was the creation of a personal student exhibition space that focused on memories, as well as other elements such as the user ‘how to’ navigation menu. I also had an input on design decisions in the main space as did all of the team. To link the personal spaces with the main space we used portals. In my space I used spatialised audio, as well as a skybox to bring the sky into the space, two diaries to bring 3D objects into the space, household furniture, photographs and colours. All of these elements combined helped to create a memory space to enhance the photography, placing the user inside the memory. The representative of the Photography course was called Brendan and he was fantastic. He and our two tutors were extremely helpful people who gave us the feedback we needed from the first presentation to the last.

This project enabled me to gain valuable experience in creating a virtual environment using 3D software such as Blender and Unity. My goal for this brief was to develop as a designer and test myself in a new area. The new area I chose was 3D development. I am a user and fan of virtual reality content as I own an Oculus Quest. I have never considered it as a career path, so I wanted to see if I enjoyed it or not. I learned a range of features on Blender, and I learned how to integrate a project into Unity, and then to integrate a Unity project into AltSpaceVR. It was exciting to see the possibilities of 3D design projects in virtual reality.

As a group if I am being totally honest at the beginning it didn’t work very well. I felt as if group members were being too individualistic, and it affected the group dynamics. For example, in the beginning some group members were having meetings without informing the rest of the group. This only happened at the beginning though. I don’t think it was helped by the brief itself, as I was more worried about how to use software than to create anything.

I felt like a headless chicken at times due to the fact that I was so inexperienced in 3D development; I felt inadequate. I am a person who gets anxious when I can’t contribute effectively. However, in the second half of the semester we were able to collaborate better.

I enjoyed the second half of the semester much more, and our regular Microsoft Teams meetings were a great help. The pandemic has been a challenge and working in a group was challenging in these circumstances. Overall, I am pleased with the work we have produced, and I believe we did the best job possible.

This next part is separate to the word count of the reflection, but I just wanted to mention:

I feel that my progress in my work was affected at the start of the brief especially due to the fact that I was attending hospital appointments back home in Leeds for a lifelong health condition that I have. I have struggled mentally ever since the diagnosis and I have more scans such as MRI scans soon as well. So my mental health has been affected due to this and I found it harder to concentrate and stay up to speed.

The pandemic itself has made me struggle anyway, so I just wanted to mention that in the same post as my reflection as I believe I could have done more but I don’t know if that’s just me being hard on myself.

Anyway, here is a virtual wave from me to you to say thank you and take care!

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componentplanet · 5 years ago

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Ryzen 9 5950X and 5900X Review: AMD Unleashes Zen 3 Against Intel’s Last Performance Bastions

Ever since April 2017, AMD has been steadily slicing into Intel’s desktop performance position, both in core counts and per-core performance. After an excellent parry in the form of Coffee Lake, Intel’s overall positioning weakened. The repeated delays afflicting the 10nm process node have kept the company iterating on the same architecture, a situation that won’t change until Rocket Lake arrives late in Q1 2021.

The story thus far (in picture form, anyway).

Up until today, Intel could still argue that it held a leadership position in areas like single-threaded performance and a number of games. Today, that support line has been cut. Zen 3 is now the fastest high-end desktop micro-architecture on the market in every category we test including (broadly) gaming. Intel’s HEDT line can still sometimes compete effectively against AMD CPUs thanks to AVX-512 optimization, but Intel’s consumer hardware still lacks this feature, which arrives with Rocket Lake.

I’m going to cut right to the chase: AMD claimed it would improve IPC by 1.19x. It has. AMD claimed that its new CCX architecture would significantly improve performance in gaming and that we’d see more uplift in titles than would typically be expected in a new CPU architecture, and that’s exactly what we see. While the improvements obviously vary from title to title, the gains across the board are real.

I’ll have more to say about Zen 3 in an upcoming article, but the news-in-brief on the CPU core is this: AMD rearchitected the entire chip, to the point that Zen 3 is effectively a new iteration of the core. Mark Papermaster and other AMD engineers we spoke to were clear about the degree of work that had gone into every aspect of the new chip.

These two slides offer a concise summary of what AMD changed when it went rummaging around in Zen 2 in search of optimizations. Branch predictor bandwidth is higher and AMD claims its zero-bubble technology reduces latency in the event of a mispredict. The execution units now have larger windows, reduced latency on some operations (this is probably not a major factor), and a six-wide dispatch unit, even though the FPU is still limited to retiring four instructions per cycle. According to AMD, the ability to burst up to six instructions produced better overall utilization of available resources. I’ll have more to say about the low-level changes in the not-too-distant future.

The biggest mid-level change to Zen 3 is the shift to an 8-core CCX. AMD also now uses a unified 32MB L3 cache rather than the 2x16MB cache structure it previously employed. The effect of these changes is quite noticeable in certain benchmarks.

Performance Comparisons

We’ve included data on the Core i9-10900K, the Ryzen 9 3900XT, Ryzen 9 5900X, and Ryzen 9 5950X. We have only partial results for the Ryzen 9 3950X — with two reviews this morning, I had to make tough choices about which chips I had time to test — but I included it where I could.

The 3900XT-5900X comparison is arguably more useful in any case. Both the 3950X and 5950X are constrained by the ~140W maximum power draw of the AM4 socket, where the 12-core has a bit more room to breathe. For the delta between the XT and the X part, just knock a few percent off the Zen 2 core.

Intel’s Core i9-10900K is the company’s current top-performing consumer desktop CPU, so we’ve included it as well. Intel will next update its desktop CPU family with Cypress Cove, the backported 10nm CPU design implemented on 14nm, arriving at the end of Q1 2021.

All systems tested using Windows 10 2004 patched up to the latest version. GeForce driver 457.09 was used on all three machines, along with a Corsair MP600 and an Nvidia RTX 3080. The Core i9-10900K was tested in an Asus ROG Maximum XII Hero (Wi-Fi), while all of the AMD CPUs were tested in an MSI X570 Godlike motherboard with 32GB of Crucial Ballistix RAM across four DIMMs, and clocked at DDR4-3600.

All of the CPUs we tested were capable of sustaining a DDR4-3600 clock without instability or other problems. As a reminder, AMD is pricing these CPUs somewhat higher than their predecessors, at $550 and $800 respectively. Launch prices on the Ryzen 9 3900X and Ryzen 9 3950X were $500 and $750, so we’ll be watching to see if the chips prove their price/performance ratios.

Performance Results

7Zip

We’ll kick off with 7zip, which used to be a benchmark that AMD and Intel split, with Intel leading in compression and AMD in decompression. In what will become a theme, that’s no longer the case, and the 16-core Ryzen 9 5950X offers nearly double the performance of the Core i9-10900K.

Cinebench R20

In years past, we would see this benchmark divvied up between Intel and AMD, with Intel reliably claiming the single-threaded peak and AMD hoarding multi-threading glory. This arrangement is nearly preserved if you only look at the Core i9-10900K and Ryzen 9 3900XT, but then the 5900X and 5950X arrive and ruin things for everybody.

AMD claims a 1.17x improvement in single-threaded and a 1.16x improvement in multi-threaded at the 12-core point. The gains for the 16-core CPU are much lower in multi-threaded, possibly due to power consumption limitations. The 5950X still pulls off a 1.06x improvement over the Ryzen 3950X in MT and 1.2x in ST.

Indigo Bench

In Indigo bench, we actually see a performance regression between the Ryzen 9 3900XT and Ryzen 9 5900X — I need to re-check this result — but the Ryzen 9 5950X still outperforms all other solutions, beating Intel by nearly 2x in the “Bedroom” scene. You would typically run these workloads on GPUs, but running the render on a CPU gives Ryzen a chance to flex its muscle.

Corona Render 1.3

Corona Render is an Intel-friendly benchmark, as evidenced by the Core i9-10900K’s very strong showing against the Core i9-3900XT. The changes to AMD’s core really help here — the 5900X is now as fast as the Ryzen 9 3950X, while the Ryzen 9 5950X takes just 82 percent as long as the Ryzen 9 3950X to complete the task.

Blender Render Benchmark 2.0.5

We tested Blender v2.9.0 using Blender Render benchmark 2.0.5, in all of the scenes distributed with the application.

The 5900X has an interesting pattern of differences from the Ryzen 9 3900XT — the gap between them isn’t static, but changes with the scene. The 5900X wins every comparison, however. The Core i9-10900K is outperformed both per-core and overall.

NeatBench 5

Neat Video is a video noise remover I’ve been trying to teach myself as part of my video upscaling work / DS9 project. The company also produces NeatBench, which tests the maximum throughput of CPUs and GPUs.

Again, AMD picks up 1.18x generationally from the 3900XT to the 5900X. Since the 3900XT is a bit faster than the 3900X, we can see AMD is landing in the ~1.22x range it told us to expect.

Scaling from the 5900X to the 5950X isn’t very good here. Either the application tops out around 12 threads, or the 5900X is soaking up the power budget with just 24 threads. Overall performance is well above Intel.

Qt Compile

Our Qt compile test is performed in Microsoft Visual Studio 2019. We see significant performance uplift from the 3900XT to the 5900X, with the workload rendering in 83.5 percent the time. Scaling from the 12-core to the 16-core is nowhere near linear, but AMD ekes out an additional 10 percent.

Game Benchmarks

AMD has boldly predicted its own ability to beat Intel in various games and resolutions, and we’re nothing if not obliging.

Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation

Ashes kicks things off with wins for AMD at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K. While a 5 percent gain from the Ryzen 9 3900XT to the Ryzen 9 5900X isn’t all that large, the fact that we’re seeing a boost at that resolution and Crazy detail levels speaks to some of the benefits AMD is getting from its new core architecture.

Assassin’s Creed: Origins

ACO is a narrow win for the Core i9-10900K, and while the gap is generally within the margin of error, it’s a gap that consistently favors the Intel CPU. AMD makes a few very small improvements here, but not all that much.

Borderlands 3

The 5950X has to do stand-in duty for game performance between the Zen 2 and Zen 3 architectures, but Borderlands 3 appears to be a game that doesn’t benefit from AMD’s new architecture. AMD wins 1080p here, while Intel narrowly takes 4K.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divded

Our Deus Ex testing method uses MSAA, which might as well be a boat anchor as far as its impact on GPU performance. Even the mighty RTX 3080 can’t shake loose any meaningful differences at any resolution.

Far Cry 5

But where Deus Ex failed, Far Cry 5 comes through with shining colors. Performance at 1080p Ultra with HD textures enabled is up a whopping 1.27x. Even 1440p gains 1.19x, and we don’t see things settle down until we hit 4K and become GPU-limited. It’s difficult to predict which games will and won’t benefit from Zen 3’s improvements, but the uplift can be substantial when it happens.

Final Fantasy XV

In Final Fantasy XV, the Ryzen 9 5900X wins 1080p and ties up with the Core i9-10900K at 1440p and 4K, while the Ryzen 9 5950X is a whisper behind. Performance is up about 5 percent over the Ryzen 9 3900XT and a bit more than that over the 3900X — again, not a bad showing in gaming, where CPU-related improvements are hard to come by.

Hitman II

We have two Hitman results to show you, one from each benchmark map.

Again, a nice 1.11x uplift for the Ryzen 9 5900X and 5950X in Miami, though the Mumbai map is much tighter. Intel and AMD each take home one map here. The Ryzen 5000 family doesn’t dispatch Intel in every single title or resolution, but it blows enough holes in Intel’s hegemony to leave the company’s claim to gaming dominance in tatters.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

Another massive uplift in SotTR actually puts AMD above Intel by 10fps. Again, the Ryzen 9 5900X maintains a 9 percent uplift over the 3900XT at 1440p, with the game becoming GPU limited at 4K.

Strange Brigade

Strange Brigade is the test we tapped to illustrate performance in the Vulkan API. The result is a dead heat between all four chips.

Warhammer II: Dawn of War

Warhammer II has always been an Intel win, as you can see when comparing the Ryzen 9 3900XT against the Intel Core i9-10900K in the built-in Skaven benchmark. Here, the uplift from Zen 2 to Zen 3 is no less than 1.34x, and again, AMD now wins the benchmark. Warhammer II truly doesn’t like AMD’s Zen, Zen+, or Zen 2 micro-architectures, because the game still picks up an additional 1.08x at 4K. AMD leads Intel in the Skaven benchmark at both 1080p and 1440p before Intel ties things up at 4K.

Add up the game results, and AMD wins six benchmarks, loses three, and ties two. That’s enough to award the company overall leadership of the segment, particularly considering the size of some of AMD’s leaps. The gains often seem to come in games where Ryzen was disadvantaged against Intel to start with, but there are also several instances of AMD outperforming Intel in absolute terms.

Conclusion: AMD Currently Offers Faster Chips and Better Values

The last facet to this conversation, of course, is price. The enthusiast market wasn’t exactly thrilled when AMD announced it would be raising prices. Do the new Ryzen CPUs justify it?

In a word, yes, at least as far as the 5900X is concerned. In Cinebench R20, the 5900X was 1.16x faster than the 3900X and costs 1.1x more. In Corona Render 1.3, using the 5900X cut rendering time by ~1.3x for an additional 10 percent on the sticker price. Gaming is harder to predict, since it varies by title, but if you are a gamer, you’ve got a shot at some very nice performance uplifts provided you’re already using a fairly high-end GPU to start with. This is not to say that we wouldn’t still see uplift on a GTX 1080 or 1080 Ti, but I haven’t evaluated that question and cannot speak to it.

The 5950X is a bit tougher. Price/performance scaling is not expected to be linear at these price points, and the ~1.1x performance improvement the 5950X turns in over the 3950X in multi-threaded code is a worst-case scenario. I’d split the difference and say that the 5900X still offers a better price/performance ratio at a higher absolute price, while the argument for the Ryzen 9 5950X is a bit more situational.

AMD now leads Intel modestly in gaming and hammers it everywhere else, in part because Intel has chosen to keep its CPU per-core pricing relatively high. The Core i9-10900K is currently selling for $488 on Amazon, versus an intended $550 MSRP for the Ryzen 9 5900X. As our benchmarks show, the Ryzen 9 5900X is considerably more than 1.13x faster than the Core i9-10900K.

Intel will have a chance to reclaim its single-threaded throne four months from now, when Rocket Lake launches, but it will not reclaim a leadership position in consumer multi-threaded performance unless it moves HEDT CPU cores into the mainstream market. It’s not even clear if that’s possible given the restrictions of the LGA1200 socket, and we’d probably know if the company was planning anything so massive.

Rocket Lake, we now know, tops out at eight cores, while AMD will continue fielding up to 16 CPU cores in the Ryzen 9 5950X. Even with a 1.2x IPC improvement outside of gaming and, say, a 1.05x improvement specifically in gaming, Intel won’t be in a position to challenge the top of the consumer multi-threaded stack. We have to assume a 1.2 – 1.25x performance uplift to even hold Rocket Lake’s overall performance at eight cores steady against Comet Lake’s 10. Intel has given us no indication that we should expect a 1.4x – 1.5x performance uplift in multi-threading, and that’s what it would take for an eight-core chip to challenge a 12-core CPU like the Ryzen 9 5900X.

Zen 3 is an unparalleled success for AMD. The company has literally redefined what kind of performance is possible within a given desktop power envelope and price point over the past 3.5 years. With this new architecture, AMD expanded its leadership position over Intel in multi-threaded and single-threaded workloads, while surpassing it in gaming overall. Intel still leads in specific titles, but AMD can claim to be leading the industry.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need a nap.

Now Read:

AMD Is Hitting Market Share It Hasn’t Held in a Decade

AMD’s Mark Papermaster Dishes the Goods on Zen 3

AMD Has Scaled Ryzen Faster Than Any Other CPU in the Past 20 Years

from ExtremeTechExtremeTech https://www.extremetech.com/computing/316943-ryzen-9-5950x-and-5900x-review from Blogger http://componentplanet.blogspot.com/2020/11/ryzen-9-5950x-and-5900x-review-amd.html

#Ryzen 9 5950X and 5900X Review: AMD Unleashes Zen 3 Against Intel’s Last Performance Bastions

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ebestlaptop · 5 years ago

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Acer Predator Helios 300 Review 2020

This is the acer predator helios 300. there's a lot of names in there isn't it so this is their mid-tier gaming laptop the nitro 5 in the 15 inch size would be the entry level model this one sits in the middle and then of course there are more expensive helios models like the helios 500 so this one has a lot to offer though for the price it starts around 1200 with an rtx 2060 and an intel core i7 10 gen cpu we have the rtx 2070 max q model which is around fifteen hundred dollars you might find it on sale for less but for that money you get a metal lid you get fast 240 hertz refresh display pretty good calling on this and it's quite relatively speaking for our gaming laptop thin and light we're going to look at it now and now a shout out to our sponsor wondershare and their demo creator and this is for windows and it's also coming for mac you know i tried it and i actually really like it what is it it's the screen capture and video editing utility so you know what a screen capture is so you need to record say gaming like we do a lot of gaming footage to show you how well laptops like this perform so you can do that but not just that the video editor is really very simple to use it's pretty intuitive it reminds me of imovie a little bit i think anybody can learn it so you record your clips and you can do things like split your clips put in transitions put in title screens you can change the playback speed you can crop it you can choose the resolution but you've got things like annotation or you can put a little fireworks going in the video which is something you certainly don't usually see in a caption utility also it's obviously great for things like training software demos if you're a teacher and you have to make lessons for school that sort of thing be sure to check out the link in the description to get a hold of it it's very affordable in fact there's even a free version that has a watermark on it unlike the paid version of it and now back to our video so confession i actually don't mind gaming laptops that look like gaming laptops as long as they look kind of cool well cool to my eyes obviously the predator tries to look a little more chill you've got anodized matte black aluminum on the lid but you do get those blue stripes hey instead of red anyway and the logo the logo the logo looks so cheap it looks like a piece of plastic just glommed right on there kind of takes away from the looks which is too bad but it's a little more toned down than the nitro which is also kind of a chill matte black but it has a reddish sort of reddish accents well you can see we'll put them both on screen for you now so you can compare the nitro is around a thousand dollars with an rtx 2060 and a core i7 so it is about 200 less than the entry level predator of course the nitro is all plastic and our predator helios has a more robust cooling system which is always important for gaming laptop and of course that 240 hertz ips map three millisecond refresh display there is a base model which is 144 hertz which is still nothing to sneeze at and speaking of the display actually the metrics are pretty good we checked it out with our colorimeter it's a little brighter than average for a gaming laptop they typically aren't very bright so it was over 300 nits by a good amount there and pretty good color gamut so that's a nice self for something that is again mid tier usually in gaming laptops the display is what takes the hit they don't get the greatest quality displays so this one's better than average which could be nice for those who are thinking of using this for content creation photo editing video editing doing some 3d blender work or something like that inside we have an intel 10th gen core i7 6 core cpu we have two ram slots so you could in theory you should be able to go up to 64 gigs though acer only mentions going up to 32 gigs this ddr4 ram rs has 16 gigs they sell dual challenge configurations in 16 and 32 gigs you have not just the m.2 boot SSD drive which is nvme and benchmark pretty well on ours but you also have a hard drive bay even if you buy a configuration that doesn't have a two and a half inch hard drive the brackets in place and they include the connector cable that you need to put that in for yourself which is sweet the cooling system on this is relatively speaking again in this price to your pretty robust and i think that helps because this is fairly thin and light acer says it's five and a half pounds which is 2.5 kilograms but ours actually measured a little bit less than that so yeah go then i when playing games yes if you're playing triple a titles on ultra settings or full hd resolution which is exactly what we do in our tests that you see running on screen well yes it will thermal throttle but a hundred millivolt undervolted using throttle stop no problem that brings it down eight degrees centigrade you can see the temperature difference right now in one game where i was actually under vaulting it but still for something this didn't like the temperatures are not that bad especially in this price tier and again for those who like to fiddle and tinker and all that sort of thing with things like under vaulting you can do that they have the acer predator sense app as always on this and you can do things like give these gpu a mild overclock set your fan speeds manually if you want certainly that could help with cooling speaking of the fans not terribly loud i mean it's a gaming laptop yes you will hear them when you're doing things like gaming or if you're doing a complex render in blender or something like that but not that loud so there is certainly thermal room there for going even higher they also have the turbo button built and keyboard deck there and that one basically does the gpu overclock sets the power profile to high performance and blasts the fans some probably most people don't want to get that loud either you might get about five percent more performance improvement by doing that but yeah if you get this play with the fan profiles on this and do a little under vaulting and good times especially for the price once again has a microsoft precision trackpad no complaints with that that keyboard is a four zone rgb backlit we don't expect per key rgb backlighting at this price point uh the keys are a little on the soft and mushy side pretty decent travel but i would like them to be a little bit firmer and a little bit crisper it's not a hideous keyboard or anything like that though but you know if you like that crispy kind of firm keyboard this one would not be it speaking of the internals again there is a second nvme SSD slot and it is possible to set up two drives in raid 0 if you want to do that acer mentions thunderbolt 3 for some of the configurations others i think just have usbc but the rest of the ports on here are pretty hardy you've got killer ethernet by the way you also have killer wi-fi 6 on board which is an intel based card so that's good but you've got plenty of usb a ports you got three of those you got your mini display port 1.4 in addition to the hdmi 2.0 so yeah it's pretty well equipped and obviously a headphone jack when it comes to the speakers they're average they're not so great they're not so terrible and again fitting for this price range there's dolby dts x ultra software there so if you're playing plugging in a set of surround sound speakers or something like that you can get some pretty nice audio out of it and even your headphone audio quality is quite fine on this but speakers you're right that's about it it has a 59 watt hour battery which is you know this is how they get them thin and they get them light folks in this price tier so that's not a very big battery it's a little bit bigger than you would see in an ultrabook but there's obviously a lot more horsepower going on here to consume it we do have nvidia optimus switchable graphics no g-sync by the way but so that's going to help if you're doing light work you're just streaming video or something like that or working in office then it's going to run on integrated graphics but still you don't expect a whole lot of battery life out of this you know about four hours on a charge doing light work i don't mean really pushing it hard and doing 3d renders or something like that our max q2070 card came with a 230 watt charger i assume that you probably get 180 watt charger for the lesser configuration with a 20 60 inside speaking of that 2070 max q yes the max q version of the car which does help us run less hard but the performance is exactly where you would expect it to be which is to say that 2070 max q is not mid-range it's getting into upper tier there so you can play any game on the market now on ultra settings and certainly have frame rates that exceed 60 frames per second on this and given that you have a fast refresh display if you're using it for something more like battle royale or apex legends you know those kind of things you can easily go into the hundreds in your frame rate with this which is sweet you're not going to overrun the 240 hertz display but maybe with something even lighter less demanding like overwatch you just might come closer to that so it punches above its weight there and if you're thinking about future games like cyberpunk 2077's coming out soon this should be able to handle absolutely no problem okay the bottom cover is plastic unlike the lid that is metal and that means real tight fit unfortunately phillips head screws to unscrew it that part's easy start at the front edge and notice that the front edge is a wraparound kind of thing so you see that so that's how that works so you have to get that off first and then you go around the size and then the back also wraps around so just so you can see where the separation point is because it might be a little confusing because of all the little grille decor so that entire thing comes off and then we finally get inside it's not much fun folks but you can do it we have speaker vents on the side plenty of ventilation over here for the cpu and gpu and the fans and uh so there's our battery again 59 watt hour not really terribly big two ram slots we have dual channel memory there 16 gigs in our model the speakers are flanking over here they're pretty small and that's why well the sound is pretty small on this and nice heat sinks see all this is not some teeny-weeny little thing we've got a lot of component coverage here so that does help it run relatively speaking for a gaming laptop with an intel 10gen cpu not too hot and here is our boot ssd we got a 512 gig in ours and right next to it is the killer wi-fi card that's the 1650i wi-fi six card based on intel hardware and there is a second ssd slot over here this is where the ssd would plug in it's kind of a tight fit there but hey and the hard drive bay visible and we've got the the mounting hardware there even though we don't have a drive and again the cable that's required to connect the drive to the motherboard is in the box so that's the acer predator helios the 2020 edition with intel 10th generation cpus and in our case the rtx 2070 max-q gpu but even if you get the rtx 2060 it's no slouch and you'll still be able to play games on high or ultra settings at the full hd resolution in this panel for the price it's not bad it competes obviously with things like the dell g5 msi's mid-range gaming laptops but as always i think acer really does a good job with the low to mid end the gaming laptop front

#Acer Predator Helios 300 #Acer Predator Helios 300 review #gaming laptop #acer gaming laptop

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sciencespies · 6 years ago

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The Decade's Biggest Technology Disappointments

https://sciencespies.com/news/the-decades-biggest-technology-disappointments/

The Decade's Biggest Technology Disappointments

Like most teen years, the past decade in technology started out someplace relatively innocent before growing moody, dark and disillusioned. In 2010, we were excited about new iPhones and finding old friends on Facebook, not fretting about our digital privacy or social media’s threat to democracy. Now we are wondering how to rein in the largest companies in the world and reckoning with wanting innovation to be both fast and responsible.

Over the past 10 years, new technology has changed how we communicate, date, work, get around and pass time. But for every hit, there have been high-profile disappointments and delays. That includes overpriced gadgets for making juice, face computers, promises of taking a vacation in space and companies claiming to be saving the world.

The failures served a purpose, acting as reality checks for the technology industry and the people who fund, regulate or consume its products. Tech companies spent the last decade first trying to grasp, then distance themselves from, their impact on society. Facebook’s famously decommissioned “move fast and break things” motto sounded plucky in 2010 and laughably misguided in 2019, when the company had, in fact, broken things.

It was a decade when billions of dollars were thrown at tech companies, and yet many of the promises those companies made never materialized, blew up in our faces or were indefinitely delayed. And while tech failures are nothing new, taken together they brought the innovation industrial complex closer to earth and made us all a bit more realistic – if less fun.

Like proper adults.

The benevolent, world-saving tech company

“Don’t be evil” read Google’s famous motto, which sat atop its code of conduct until 2018, when it was quietly demoted to the last line.

At the beginning of the decade, that is exactly how many of the largest tech companies and CEOs marketed themselves. Their products were not only going to make daily life easier or more enjoyable, but they also would make the entire world better – even if their business models depended on ads and your personal data.

“Facebook was not originally founded to be a company. We’ve always cared primarily about our social mission,” chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a 2012 letter, just before the company’s initial public offering. He outlined lofty visions going forward, including that Facebook would create a more “honest and transparent dialogue” about government through accountability.

Instead, the decade turned toward disinformation, and hate speech spread on social media. Facebook, Twitter and Google’s YouTube were used to spread disinformation ahead of the 2016 U.S. election, while Google briefly worked on a search engine for China that would censor content. Companies profited off mountains of user data they collected but failed to protect, as major data breaches hit Equifax, Yahoo and others.

In response, workers are pushing back, growing into quiet armies attempting to redirect their companies toward social goals.

Face computers

Google co-founder Sergey Brin debuted Google Glass in 2012 by wearing a prototype of the smart glasses onstage. Its real PR outing came later that year when skydivers live-streamed their jump out of a blimp above San Francisco during a Google developer conference.

By showing information in front of the face instead of on a phone, Google said, the $1,500 Glass would allow people to interact more with the world around them. Instead, its legacy has been questions about our right to privacy from recording devices, the word “glasshole,” and at least one bar fight. The company stopped selling Glass to consumers in 2015 and shifted it to a workplace product, targeting everyone from factory workers to doctors.

Google was not alone. Microsoft made HoloLens, a technically ambitious piece of eyewear that looked like round steampunk goggles and used augmented reality. Facebook bought virtual-reality goggle maker Oculus for $2 billion and heavily invested in and promoted it as a gaming and entertainment device (and the future of social media). Magic Leap, another augmented reality headset promising immersive and mind-blowing entertainment, managed to raise $2.6 billion and only release one $2,295 developer product.

Eventually we may wear glasses that display useful information on top of the real world, outfitted with smart assistants that whisper in our ears. Google’s early attempt at a consumer face-wearable was not destined to be that device.

A more efficient way of eating

Juice. Colorful, thirst-quenching, packed with vitamins, on-demand juice. It seemed an unlikely thing for Silicon Valley to try to disrupt. But in the 2010s, entrepreneurs’ impatience with preparing and even consuming the calories necessary to survive led to a number of eating innovations.

One of the decade’s most memorable tech failures asked the question: What if you spent $699 for an elaborate machine that squeezed juice from proprietary bags of fruit and vegetable pulp for you? The answer, discovered by intrepid Bloomberg journalists in 2017, is that you could squeeze those packets with your hands instead of overpaying for a machine. That machine was Juicero, and it raised $120 million in funding before shutting down just five months later.

Other food innovations have fallen fall short of their revolutionary promises. Smart ovens became fire hazards; meal-kit delivery start-ups went under; robots tossed salads, mixed drinks and flipped burgers; and pod-based devices for random foods (cocktails, tortillas, cookies, yoghurt, jello shots) failed. And then there’s Soylent – a meal in drink form, designed to save time by cutting out “tasting good” and “chewing.” Soylent has managed to find a small but enthusiastic fan base, and even got into solids recently with a line of meal-replacement bars called Squared.

The decade’s real food change came from delivery apps that pay on-demand workers to bring meals made in actual kitchens to your door. Those companies are dealing with employee protests over low and confusing pay while trying to become profitable.

Non-Facebook social networks

Remember Path? Color? Yik Yak, Meerkat and Google Buzz? And iTunes Ping, Apple’s short-lived attempt at making its music hub social? Start-ups and the tech giants alike launched social products over the past decade, but few succeeded.

In 2010 there was Google Buzz, which was quickly replaced by Google+ in 2011. The service struggled to attract users and experienced privacy issues, such as a bug exposing more than 52 million people’s data. It was finally declared dead this year, though some of its best features live on in Google Photos.

Vine burned bright for too short a time before being closed in 2016 by Twitter, which had bought the company for a reported $30 million in 2012. (Speaking of Twitter, it hung on thanks in part to its popularity with politicians, celebrities and people who are mad online, though it is far smaller than Facebook. Snapchat and TikTok have also carved out niches.)

Facebook dominated at the start of the decade and continues to dominate at the end, in part by buying or blatantly copying any competitors along the way. It acquired Instagram and WhatsApp, integrating both more closely with the Facebook brand. Even with major scandals and fumbles, its global user base grew to more than 2 billion people.

A crowdfunding, DIY revolution

For a short time, it looked as though the next generation of gadgets would come from outside the usual Silicon Valley idea factories. They would be dreamed up by passionate hobbyists, prototyped on 3-D printers and funded by fans instead of venture capitalists (though still manufactured in Shenzhen, China). Despite some notable successes – Oculus, Peloton, Boosted Boards – it turns out getting an idea from your cocktail napkin to market is pretty tough.

Notable failures include the disappointing Coolest Cooler, which featured both Bluetooth and a blender and raised more than $13 million on Kickstarter in 2014. It failed to deliver products to a third of its backers; many that shipped didn’t work. Others never materialized, such as iBackPack, which was supposed to produce a WiFi hotspot. The people behind it raised more than $800,000 and were accused by the Federal Trade Commission of using those funds to buy bitcoin and pay off credit cards. Skarp Laser Razor, a razor with dubious hair-removal technology, managed to get more than $4 million in pledges from interested customers before Kickstarter suspended its campaign for violating policies on working prototypes.

(Kickstarter said the vast majority of its products make it to production and that it aims “to be quite clear about the fact that not all projects will go smoothly.”)

Consumer 3-D printers also failed to live up to the hype. We were supposed to have a printer in every home, spitting out replacement LEGOs and screws, art projects, and even food. The high cost of the devices and the skills needed to use them could not compete with overnight shipping.

Drones dropping deliveries

“Could it be, you know, four, five years? I think so. It will work, and it will happen, and it’s gonna be a lot of fun,” Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos said.

The year was 2013, and Bezos was on “60 Minutes” to unveil the next big thing in package delivery: drones. He said that within that time frame, quadcopters would be able to drop packages from warehouses at customers’ doors within 30 minutes. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

In 2016, Amazon showed off its first commercial drone delivery in a rural area of the United Kingdom, a 13-minute delivery of an Amazon Fire TV streaming device and a bag of popcorn. Its latest drone iteration was on display earlier this year at MARS, its weird tech conference, again promising that drone deliveries were coming soon.

But as of the end of the decade, Amazon packages are still being delivered by humans. In fact, Amazon announced in 2018 that it was adding 20,000 delivery vans via third-party delivery partners to its ground fleet. Other companies, including Uber, UPS and Alphabet’s Wing, have also been testing drone deliveries, and it’s possible that we will have boxes from the sky onto porches in the next decade.

Vaping to fix smoking

It was supposed to be safer than smoking and a way to quit nicotine altogether. While vaping has indeed caught on, its biggest selling point has blown up in recent years. Eight deaths and more than 2,500 cases of lung-related illnesses have been linked to vaping in the United States.

Critics say fun-sounding flavors and colorful devices, most notably from the company Juul, have made vaping wildly popular with teenagers – one in four high schoolers vapes, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Now the FDA and lawmakers are investigating vaping companies. But if we draw on experience from the cigarette industry, vaping is not likely to disappear anytime soon.

Amazon’s big phone play

Apple and Google have direct access to billions of people with their smartphone operating systems and hardware – 2.5 billion devices run Google’s Android operating system, and 900 million iPhones are in use.

One company noticeably absent from our pockets is Amazon, but not for lack of trying. After several years of stealth development, Amazon announced its Fire Phone in 2014. The smartphone did not look like much, started at $199, ran on a customized version of Android and was available only on AT&T. Amazon reported $83 million of unused inventory in late 2014, and it discontinued the Fire Phone a year after its introduction.

Now that Amazon is competing against those two companies for voice-assistant dominance, its lack of a smartphone is even more glaring. It has put Alexa in anything with a microphone, from cameras to headphones and, soon, eye glasses. (It is on smartphones, but you have to open the Alexa app first.) Meanwhile Apple’s Siri and Google’s Assistant are already in pockets, built into the core of the devices and listening for their next cue.

Tourists in space

It is no secret that big-name billionaires love space. Despite their passion, the three boldest aspiring space barons have made and missed deadlines for sending people into space this decade.

Richard Branson said Virgin Galactic would fly tourists into space by 2020, but its last test mission was two test pilots and a crew member at the start of last year. Bezos said at an Air Force Association conference in late 2018 that Blue Origin would send a test flight into the upper atmosphere with people on board this year, but the most recent test flight, on Dec. 11, contained no humans. In 2017, Elon Musk announced that SpaceX had taken deposits to fly two passengers around the moon in 2018. That flight did not take place. He has the whole next decade to hit a different goal, set in 2011: sending someone to Mars by 2031.

There are plenty of interested customers. Virgin Galactic has sold tickets to more than 700 people wanting to take a trip to space at $250,000 a seat.

If there is one thing on this list we would not want to rush just to meet a deadline, it is loading civilians into private rockets and hurling them into space.

#News

#12-2019 Science News #2019 Science News #Earth Environment #earth science #Environment and Nature #Nature Science #News Science Spies #Our Nature #planetary science #Science #Science News #Science Spies #Science Spies News #Space Physics & Nature #Space Science #News

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magzoso-tech · 6 years ago

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New Post has been published on https://magzoso.com/tech/the-decades-biggest-technology-disappointments/

The Decade's Biggest Technology Disappointments

Like proper adults.

The benevolent, world-saving tech company

“Don’t be evil” read Google’s famous motto, which sat atop its code of conduct until 2018, when it was quietly demoted to the last line.

In response, workers are pushing back, growing into quiet armies attempting to redirect their companies toward social goals.

Face computers

A more efficient way of eating

Non-Facebook social networks

A crowdfunding, DIY revolution

(Kickstarter said the vast majority of its products make it to production and that it aims “to be quite clear about the fact that not all projects will go smoothly.”)

Drones dropping deliveries

“Could it be, you know, four, five years? I think so. It will work, and it will happen, and it’s gonna be a lot of fun,” Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos said.

Vaping to fix smoking

Amazon’s big phone play

Tourists in space

It is no secret that big-name billionaires love space. Despite their passion, the three boldest aspiring space barons have made and missed deadlines for sending people into space this decade.

There are plenty of interested customers. Virgin Galactic has sold tickets to more than 700 people wanting to take a trip to space at $250,000 a seat.

If there is one thing on this list we would not want to rush just to meet a deadline, it is loading civilians into private rockets and hurling them into space.

#Miscellaneous

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mindthump · 8 years ago

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Top 3D modeling software options http://ift.tt/2uYHr3a

Whether you are looking for the right software to fuel your latest design project or picking the best engineering program for a company or class, here’s the best 3D modeling software — and what makes them such popular picks.

Keep in mind, however, this software can be taxing on your system. It’s a good idea to carefully examine the required specifications for running the software in question, before making a final decision. Many developers provide both a “minimal” and “recommended” set of specs. The minimal set will allow you to run the software, but, depending on your computer’s configuration, you may not have access to all the features that you need. Try to focus on recommended or optimal specifications and make sure your hardware can handle it.

Blender (Free)

Blender continues to be one of the most user-focused design programs available, especially if you’re still a little new to modeling and want a free option where you can learn, play, and then get to work once you’ve familiarized yourself with the program. Because it’s such a large, open-source project, it can do a bit of everything, allowing you to tackle modeling, rigging, animation, simulation rendering, motion tracking, full-game creation, and more. There’s a strong “by artists, for artists” philosophy behind it, which makes it particularly well-suited for independent creators.

Unlike some software on our list, Blender excels at multi-stage development, and is able to handle many different steps toward a completed product. However, while you can learn a vast amount about modeling from both the software and its robust user community, it’s not easy to jump right it. Even preliminary modeling requires a bit of patience, so prepare to spend some time learning the tools — including a few of Blender’s odd control choices.

Download it now from:

Blender

Cinema 4D ($3,495+)

Maxon’s Cinema 4D software has a tight focus on advanced 3D modeling, which makes it ideal for conceptual product design and those times when you need to add more complex layers to artistic projects. It’s also very slick. The interface is filled with detailed tools, everything has a “help” option associated with it, and the system goes through careful quality control before updates are released, making it more dependable than some alternatives. There’s also a rudimentary version available for less-intensive projects, but it’s good to keep in mind that even the full version doesn’t branch out much beyond detailed 3D modeling. It’s great modeling software, but its limited applications make it less useful for some creators. You’ll also need a Maxon license to use Cinema 4D.

Buy it now from:

Maxon

Autodesk Maya ($1,470 annually)

Autodesk’s Maya animation software was recently updated with a new, user-friendly interface that features drop-down menus and highly visible icons. The company has also done a lot of work to integrate tools from Autodesk Mudbox (previously from Skymatter), allowing for more deft polygon sculpting, and letting you reap the benefits of two types of modeling software from a single application. The amount of detail you can achieve in Maya is quite impressive, and the 3D modeling software is ideal for detailed texturing and modeling, along with those with an eye for animation (Maya was integral in the making of Kubo and the Two Strings, for example). Future editions should be even better, too, given Autodesk will likely integrate more Mudbox tools.

Buy now it from:

AutoDesk

AutoCAD ($1,176 annually)

AutoCAD is an Autodesk classic. That said, we’re putting two Autodesk entries in a row to highlight their differences. AutoCAD’s 2D and 3D modeling is designed specifically for engineering, architecture, and product design. Graphic designers and artists won’t find this software very useful, but engineers often learn it while perusing their degree, rendering it a familiar choice for many. The company has also worked to actively update the software, and has added greater customization and a slew of useful sharing tools — including an accompanying mobile app — which make it a great pick for companies. Opting for the free trial may be a good idea if you’re thinking about using the software professionally and want to ensure it has everything you need.

Buy it now from:

AutoDesk

ZBrush ($795)

ZBrush traditionally is used as a “sculpting” tool, one that lets you to add greater details after nuts-and-bolts 3D modeling. However, in recent years, a number of updates have come to the system to improve how it works and what it does, including additional tools that allow creators to start building directly in the system and even apply rendering after the sculpting phase. This has turned ZBrush into an excellent, general-purpose tool for artists who need to carefully detail their work and would rather not jump between expensive platforms to get it done.

Buy it now from:

Pixologic

3DS Max ($1,470 annually)

For those invested in creating high-end productions that will really impress the public, 3DS Max is worth a look. The software — which was used to create graphics for Assassin’s Creed, among other projects — is focused on modeling, ultra-detailed animation, and rendering via Arnold, V-Ray, Iray, and other commonplace tools. Like Autodesk’s other software, the latest updates are pushing further integration and compatibility with 3DS, while focusing on making the software as VR-friendly as possible for developers. However, if you’re more interested in basic modeling than the progression toward full video animation, you may want to look elsewhere.

Buy it now from:

AutoDesk

SketchUp ($695)

While modeling software can be notoriously difficult to master, SketchUp is designed for the real world, with feature made for beginners, learners, and more flexible workplaces. The modeling software includes a “3D Warehouse,” which is used to store and share models with the community, as well as a number of extensions that add different pre-built shapes. However, this simplicity also limits the reach of SketchUp; it’s primarily used for architectural modeling, interior design, home planning, and similar projects. There are several versions available, though, each of which is based on your goals, along with both personal and professional use.

Buy it now from:

SketchUp

Want to start saving for your dream vacation? Here are the best budgeting apps to help you

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Date with Uncle Sam? Here are 7 of the best sites for e-filing your taxes

#IFTTT #Feedly #hmmm #future #business #good to know #tech

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jojogape · 8 years ago

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A little big confession.

I think it’s about time I got something out of my chest.

It’s got something to do with game development, but mostly with my... career.

It’s been a strange year in this aspect. I’ll put it under a read more, but long story short, everything’s fine now.

I’m dropping out from college.

After seven years trying and failing to rewire my brain into thinking like a programmer, I’ve finally come to the conclusion that programming is simply not for me.

Since I had spent some years taking “”“computer science lessons””” (read: learning to use Google, playing games, using Microsoft Word and Excel) back then, around 2006 I decided computers were my stuff. Not because I loved the idea of walking around messing with the wires and chips, or learning any programming language, but simply because I thought using a computer was Fun.

Now now, as a kid I always kept changing my life goals, I’ve wanted to be an astronaut, a cook, a teacher, a freaking singer???? Or maybe an actor. I don’t even remember. But the one and only goal in life that didn’t change was making videogames.

Back in the 90′s or early 00′s, this was a really strange dream.

“What a weird job! That’s so nerdy! That doesn’t get you anywhere! What do you even study to become a game developer!?”

So I, in all my innocence, thought it was a good idea to get into computer science. Nice! I’ll get to use the latest technology, I’ll animate in 3D, I’ll work at Pixar, I’ll-

No.

I simply deluded myself with the idea that computer science would get me where I wanted, because in Spain, or least most of the country, there isn’t such a thing as a “videogame development” career. I expected to, at least, know the basic stuff thanks to computer science, and boy was I wrong.

75% of the career is directed solely at programming, and hardware. Programming in different languages, programming obsolete ways of storing memory, programming ways of laying out and processing data, programming databases, imagining strange case scenarios that are extremely specific to the very concept you’re trying to learn and probably not even going to use in the rest of your life.

From the remaning 25%, about 15% is math. As in, boring, extensively explained and justified, and needlessly advanced, math. I personally had little to no problem with it - I passed most if not all of the math subjects in the first two years. And 10% is booooooooooooring protocols and company stuff.

Most of the time, when I thought of dropping out practically every year, there were two main fears: A, disappointing my family, and B, losing my friends. For the record, my university friends and I are still in contact, and we’re a solid squad. They were the first friends with whom I could be 100% myself.

But A, continuously failing my programming subjects made my family disappointed anyway, and B, my friends passed different subjects at different speeds, so we don’t really see each other that often in class anymore. As of this semester, I don’t share classes with any of them. So those two reasons slowly vanished and I was left in some sort of limbo where I didn’t want to keep studying, but I kept going because lol inertia.

This year, all of my subjects were programming subjects, and all of them were horribly boring and time-consuming to me. So, in order to keep my grip on reality somehow, I added a third year subject to my year: web applications development.

It’s not really about developing apps at all, it’s more about getting in touch with a few programs such as Audacity, Blender, Gimp, etc... and learning about design, cameras, file formats.

“Awesome! Something I actually know about!”

Needless to say, this subject was a freaking breath of fresh air. I had a blast every Wednesday afternoon, editing audio, learning 3D, restoring old pictures... it was fun. It was exciting. I, again, felt the joy of studying something I loved. It made me feel so excited I actually decided to make Someday v0.10, and take a short 3D modeling course for free.

The 3D modeling course was amazing. It actually made me say “THIS is want I want to do”.

Once the subject was over in February, I was brought back to reality. The rest of my year was all programming.

But that same month, one or two people began offering money for my drawings. Ever since the previous summer, I saw my family grow increasingly proud of my drawings and, heck, my work in general. They actually supported my interest in 2D or 3D art, and they recently started supporting my interest in formally learning Japanese (I’m actually looking for courses in case I can join one).

My world turned upside down entirely. And suddenly, everything came together.

I don’t like computer science.

I like all of the artistic stages of game development.

I like drawing. I like designing. I like writing stories and dialogues. I like translating. I like modeling. I like composing.

I don’t like programming, or anything about marketing.

I like art.

The idea of being An Artist is completely alien to me, though. When I was a kid, my drawings were terrible. Like, really terrible. I didn’t even like drawing. But I kept doing it. I wanted to share my ideas, my worlds, my characters. And eventually I grew to love practiically any form of art, but especially if it was directed at videogame development.

Even helping at making an animated show would be awesome to me.

This idea stuck to my mind and I actually became unable to study almost any programming at all. Every exam I would be like “I hate this. Why am I doing this?”.

It’s been rough. And hard. But it is finally time to face that by heading this way any longer, I’m not going anywhere. Even if I did finish my career, what would my job be? I’m not a programmer, simple as that. I can’t understand how I can be happy with a job where I obsessively spend hours looking for that pesky error in my absurdly long and complicated code.

What am I doing now? Well, I’m taking a similar course about computer science.

But this time, it’ll be different.

1. It’s free. I might even get a scholarship (WAIT IS THAT ACTUALLY STILL A THING THAT EXISTS?!?!?)

2. It’s in my town. No more buses or having to refill every day - we can barely afford that.

3. It’s not programming-centered at all. It’s way more job-driven, way more flexible, and it doesn’t consume so much of your time.

4. It’s just two years!

I don’t discard the idea of going back to college in the far future, but for now, I need to drop out. Student loans are huge, Java is a horrible evil monster, our education system sucks.

So, I’m almost out of college. And I’m okay, my family knows, my friends know, and they support me (thankfully). This might be the first actual summer vacation I get since 2007, with no tests waiting for me in September.

I have finally found out what I’m good at, and I want to steer my life in that direction. In the meantime, I’m still trying to earn some money with my art. My Patreon is here. (A little on the nose, don’t you think? Yeah. Capitali$m does weird thing$ to you.)

I’m pretty sure this will turn alright. This might be the best decision I’ve made in years. Better late than never.

#suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuper long post

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ryotaiku · 8 years ago

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Quick and dirty editing software review

Introduction

This is a list of all the editing software I’ve ever used and whether or not it’s worth using. All of this has been my experience using them, and doesn’t take into account what my PC build was like at each time of use. But I can safely say that each opinion I hold here probably still applies today. I might make a followup if any significant changes happen though.

Windows Movie Maker

Great place to start. It lets you cut videos apart and rearrange them in whatever order you need, and lets you show text on-screen, but that’s about it. It has some preset video effects you can apply, like playback speed and color filters, but not much else. It has the bare minimum requirements of an editing software.

Windows Live Movie Maker

Good gods this software is terrible. It’s designed to work like iMovie, only it does none of the things that makes iMovie worth using. I don’t understand why Microsoft ever thought replacing WMM with this was a good idea. Don’t even consider it.

Adobe Premiere Elements

I wish I could say this was a good alternative to Premiere, but it really isn’t. It doesn’t have any of the features that makes Premiere worthwhile, it crashes a lot, and most of the features that do make it worth using are locked behind several paywalls. Waste of $100.

Sony Vegas Movie Studio

Vegas has all the features you’ll need in an editing software. Image panning, chroma key, text display and more. Unfortunately, Vegas is full of bugs. Nothing to make it crash, but enough to be annoying to the point where you’ll want to use something else. The worst one for me was the delay for voice recording getting progressively longer as I used it, and sometimes video clips wouldn’t move from their spot on the timeline. Overall worth it for a while, but I guarantee you’ll want to use something else after a few years.

Adobe Premiere

This is the latest software I’ve been using. It’s less intuitive than Vegas, but it has all the same features and generally feels more “professional” to use. Could use some better export settings though; specifically an option to export video into MP4. That’s probably already there, but I can’t find it.

Conclusion

Most video editing software is garbage. Someone needs to make a free open-source alternative so we don’t have to use any of these anymore; like what 7Zip is to WinRAR, what OBS is to Xsplit, what Blender is to Maya, what Shadowplay is to Fraps, and what paint.net is to Photoshop. Somebody get on that!

#editing #article #review #sony #sony vegas #adobe #adobe premiere #windows #windows movie maker #microsoft

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vuakeo2471 · 3 years ago

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https://consumer.huawei.com/uk/laptops/matebook-16s/buy

HUAWEI MateBook 16s

Little Known Facts About MateBook 16s Buy.

Dat komt door het grote formaat en het glazen oppervlak. Daardoor grijp je nooit mis en glijdt je vinger er bovendien gemakkelijker overheen dan bij een plastic touchpad. Het toetsenbord is uiteraard voorzien van achtergrondverlichting. Gezien het formaat van de behuizing hadden we wat meer toetsentravel verwacht, maar de aanslag is heel duidelijk. If you find any error in prices or specs or have any suggestion to makes improved this Web-site please mail us a therapeutic massage by Speak to us webpage.

When you are at an Business or shared network, you can question the community administrator to operate a scan over the network trying to find misconfigured or infected products.

iMovie Tell tales like by no means prior to. A straightforward layout and intuitive editing options ensure it is straightforward to make wonderful 4K motion pictures and Hollywood-style trailers.

Combined with the one of a kind textured coating about the lid that softens the feel of tricky, really hard steel, 0° Black demonstrates you’re in no way average, normally contemplating outdoors the box, and hunting for anything new.

The Apple Television set application Film playback check measures battery everyday living by playing again High definition 1080p material with Show brightness set to eight clicks from base. Battery existence varies by use and configuration. See apple.com/batteries For more info.

There’s all the more performance on tap any time you enable General performance mode: This will boost the CPU’s electrical power to your sustained TDP of forty five W. Vivobook Pro 16X OLED will Permit you can get every little thing performed faster, in design.

When you’re not picky about picture high-quality, even though, a reduce-resolution Display screen could be an appropriate sacrifice in the quest to economize.

In reality, the broad quantity of Windows products means Microsoft’s OS will give you probably the most overall flexibility in deciding on a laptop, period.

It’s better to get a scientific approach when searching. Enable’s run by means of how for making a sensible choose.

Valt er aan die components van de MateBook 16 nog wat te upgraden en zijn de onderdelen goed vervangbaar? Om dat uit te zoeken, schroeven we de laptop open up. De bodemplaat is gelukkig eenvoudig te verwijderen.

In Blender gaan alle remmen los, maar zelfs dan is de MateBook erg stil. Als je de MateBook openmaakt, zie je waardoor dat vermoedelijk komt. Er is namelijk een flink koelsysteem ingebouwd satisfied twee heatpipes en twee ventilators. Op het moederbord zie je ook de

The minimum amount level of cupboard space most laptop shoppers need to consider is 256GB. This can accommodate the appreciable requirements HUAWEI MateBook 16s buy of working process updates and enormous apps like Microsoft Place of work with place remaining more than. People who have sizable collections of movies, pics, or new music (or any but probably the most informal of Computer system avid gamers) ought to seek out out no less than 512GB.

You will discover speaker grilles either facet with the keyboard, and these output sound toward the consumer quite efficiently. Audio good quality is well rounded, with a superb amount of bass.

At Many of these monitor measurements, you can find styles in either the standard “clamshell” laptop shape or maybe a 2-in-1 convertible design. The latter provides a hinge that rotates the display 360 levels so You should use it for a makeshift tablet or prop it up just like a tent for looking at motion pictures.

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entergamingxp · 5 years ago

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is the entry-level RTX fast enough for ray traced gaming? • Eurogamer.net

It’s rare that we review graphics card variants at Digital Foundry but in the case of the RTX 2060 KO from EVGA, we’re going to make an exception. Nvidia’s entry-level, feature-complete Turing card sat at a $349 price-point for quite some time – a touch pricey perhaps when the significantly superior RTX 2060 Super turned up costing just $50 more. However, with this new EVGA KO model clocking in at $299, it’s time to re-assess the product and specifically, just how capable the card is in handling games using hardware-accelerated ray tracing.

Primarily, it’s the RTX aspect of the 2060 that sets it apart from its nearest AMD competitor, the RX 5600 XT. Its ability to tap into the DXR API and by extension access the full range of visual options available in supported games is obviously a nice feature to have – and with ray tracing confirmed for the next-gen consoles, the broader adoption of RT is a case of not if but when. On top of that, the inclusion of Turing’s tensor cores allows for the 2060 to access hardware-accelerated machine learning features with the AI-powered DLSS upscaling pretty much the only application for this technology in the here and now. This is all in addition to standard graphics power that’s generally in excess of the RX 5600 XT – to the point that AMD had to deliver an 11th hour BIOS upgrade to bring its latest Navi release back into contention.

However, while generally well -received for its price vs performance level (especially with the recent haircut on pricing) there’s a lot of discussion surrounding the RTX 2060’s prowess in terms of delivering accomplished ray tracing support – and perhaps rightly so, when looking at the first wave of games with DXR functionality. In the past, I’ve managed to get an effectively locked 1080p60 performance level with the RTX 2060 when playing Battlefield 5 with ray tracing enabled – but it required some options tweaking and an overclock. On top of that, there’s perhaps a broader question to answer: is 1080p60 actually good enough to begin with bearing in mind that the RTX 2060 ordinarily performs rather well at 1440p?

These are all pertinent questions but perhaps just as important is the technical make-up of the KO version of the RTX 2060 itself. Clearly, corners are cut to deliver the more aggressive pricing. Nvidia’s reference model – the Founders Edition – is a more deluxe product with superior build quality, improved power delivery and higher quality materials. While possessed of a decent metal back plate, the KO’s shroud is plastic, the cooler is less substantial and its four-phase power delivery does the job but limits overclocking potential. Ultimately though, the main difference you’ll actually notice during gaming is that it’s somewhat louder than the Founders. That’s the only real grumble I can muster against it.

youtube

The latest DF Direct sees John and Rich sit down to discuss the topics raised in the new announcement from Microsoft.

However, as initially discovered by Steve Burke at GamersNexus, the 2060 KO is somewhat fascinating in that it uses a TU104 Nvidia processor – the same processor that powers the RTX 2070 Super and RTX 2080. It’s a salvage part, with CUDA cores disabled to match the 1920 complement in the Founders Edition’s standard TU106 processor. In my tests, I found performance to be entirely identical, with one exception. As GamersNexus discovered, the CUDA path in the Blender rendering tool delivers much faster performance than existing RTX 2060 cards. The extent of the boost varies on the complexity of the workload, but one example demo I tested delivered a 19 per cent reduction in render time.

However, in all other respects, the KO performs exactly as an RTX 2060 should do. The pared back power delivery system means that you can’t ramp up the power slider in MSI Afterburner, meaning that overclocking can’t be pushed to the max as it can in other cards. However, I still managed to add 120MHz to the core and 500MHz to the 6GB of GDDR6 memory and even with power constraints in place, the card did deliver that extra performance, adding around five per cent overall to frame-rates. These are the OC settings I use on my standard Founders version, so I don’t feel particularly short-changed here. The only real trade is the noise factor: overclocking makes a louder-than-usual graphics card even less discreet.

All told then, EVGA’s more price-conscious RTX 2060 delivers pretty much everything you’d want from a card of this class, it’s just somewhat noisier than the reference design. Its performance parity with the original Founders version extends to ray tracing support too, which is primarily why I decided to revisit the RTX 2060 in the first place, which leads us onto the key question: is the entry level ray tracer powerful enough to deliver a decent gaming experience?

It’s a difficult question to answer because we are still in the early days of the transition across to the next generation of rendering technology but we’ve already some a long, long way. First of all, if you’re intent on sticking to native resolution rendering, 1080p was – and is – the natural target for DXR gaming on this class of product and I really would recommend dialing in a +120MHz core/+500MHz VRAM overclock for additional stability in performance. The biggest issue I have with early DXR games in particular is that the lowest frame-rate areas are much more of an issue than average performance.

This gets you to 1080p60 in Battlefield 5 with medium DXR paired with ultra-level rasterisation features and high quality textures – good enough to get a good ray traced experience, but nothing like the performance of the standard non-RT edition of the game. DXR medium gives you the bulk of the RT experience, with real-time reflections scaling across settings according to the roughness cut-off in the materials. The higher up the scale you go, the more materials exhibit ray traced reflections. Based on later RT-supported titles, the performance hit is somewhat high, as you may expect from a first-gen DXR game.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider is another early example of DXR implementation. In fact, alongside BF5 it was the first RT experience we had way back at Gamescom 2018. Its benchmark suggests that the performance hit of RT is fairly light compared to Battlefield 5, but simply starting Lara’s adventure from scratch demonstrates that this patently not the case. As you ramp up the DXR preset, Tomb Raider replaces more and more of the rasterised shadow maps with higher quality, more realistic RT alternatives, with the ultra setting effectively moving the entire system to DXR, where foliage in particular is particularly taxing on the GPU. Again, there are moments where the RTX 2060 can’t sustain 1080p60.

The final first-gen DXR title I tested was Metro Exodus, which possesses an utterly beautiful ray traced global illumination solution. Setting the game to the high global preset with DXR similarly set to high effectively gives you 1080p60 with some minor dips into the 50s in more challenging scenes. It’s an experience to savour, but again, the fact that a card that performs so well at 1440p in standard 3D gaming has to render at 1080p to get acceptable performance is going to be an issue for many. The RTX 2060 can deliver a good ray tracing experience but the question is whether you’d take that hit when the standard game still looks so good.

Of course, throughout the history of gaming, pushing the frontier of graphics technology in the PC space has always come with a performance cost, whether we’re talking about programmable pixel shaders, hardware T&L, or just about any of the software-based innovations found in Crysis. Nvidia’s original plan was to offset most, if not all, of the performance hit by using the tensor cores, with machine learning-based upscaling replacing the temporal anti-aliasing solutions in most modern games. It didn’t go quite to plan. If RT had a rocky start, it’s been harder still for DLSS, where results have historically varied from rather impressive to not so good.

Witcher 3: Ultra, Post-AA, No Hairworks

RX 5500 XT 8GB

RX 580

GTX 1660

RX 590

GTX 1660 Super

GTX 1660 Ti

RX 5600 XT

RX 5600 XT OC

RTX 2060

So is the RTX 2060 good enough for ray traced games? I can understand some of the bad press the card has got in this regard based on the kinds of results I’ve just talked about from the first-gen games – but technology is constantly improving and recent titles are showing some genuine promise. Obviously, the more GPU power you have at your disposal, the better the results you can expect, but the RTX 2060 is important because it’s the baseline performance level Nvidia has set for access to the next generation of GPU features. I suspect that when the new Ampere architecture cards arrive later this year, we’ll still have RTX 2060-class performance – it’ll just be cheaper: RTX 3050, anyone? With that in mind, I think it’s just as important to test RT support in the latest games on this class of hardware as it is to dial up everything to the max on an RTX 2080 Ti.

DXR implementations are improving which helps the case for the RTX 2060 but I think the most radical leap I’ve seen has come from Nvidia’s top-to-bottom revamp of its AI upscaling solution, DLSS. It started with Remedy’s Control, a game that ships with a simply amazing DXR feature set – it’s the showcase game for ray tracing in the here and now, in fact. To begin with, the performance outlook seems rather familiar when running this game on the RTX 2060. Even on DXR medium – reflections only – paired with mostly medium settings (in line with the console versions), performance often lurks in 50fps territory but can drop down into the high 30s.

However, the revised version of DLSS that Control ships with allows you to set internal resolution to 720p, with the algorithm upscaling pretty well to 1080p. The upshot is that not only are we now well north of 60fps in almost all scenarios, RTX 2060 owners can engage the high DXR setting and still experience smooth performance with the complete ray tracing experience for the best RT game on the market. Impressed by the results, I decided to push my luck: I opted for 4K DLSS from a 1080p base resolution with all RT features still active, but frame-rate capped to 30fps. The end result is an experience that still showcases DXR beautifully but delivers a cleaner overall image than Xbox One X’s 1440p-based UHD output while running at the same frame-rate. The comparison is interesting but the comparison gallery above should prove illuminating – Remedy’s TAA solution does have some advantages.

Crysis 3: Very High, SMAA T2X

RX 580

RX 5500 XT 8GB

GTX 1660

RX 590

GTX 1660 Super

GTX 1660 Ti

RX 5600 XT

RX 5600 XT OC

RTX 2060

In terms of image quality, Control’s DLSS solution is good but a recent, radical algorithm upgrade has changed everything. As we’ve already discussed in other Digital Foundry articles, the new ‘DLSS 2.0’ is capable of delivering image quality comparable with native rendering resolution using anything as low as a quarter resolution base image. With Wolfenstein Youngblood set to console-equivalent medium settings on DLSS performance mode, we’re getting AI upscaling from 540p to 1080p which looks as good (if not better) than the PlayStation 4 version of the game. The performance boost with RTX 2060 is enough to deliver a great 1440p experience with ray tracing enabled – or alternatively you can re-deploy DLSS with RT disabled to deliver 4K gaming at 80 frames per second or upwards. This is not bad at all for a $299 graphics card.

This is all a roundabout way of saying that the promises Nvidia made back at Gamescom 2018 are now much closer to reaching fruition and the building blocks are in place to ensure that the RTX 2060 ‘entry level’ ray tracer is in a far better position now than it was in the early, uncertain days of support. But should you buy one? It’s a tricky one. While the card was priced closer to the RX 2060 Super, it was very easy to recommend saving up for the more powerful card. It’s a good chunk faster and features an additional 2GB of memory.

Typically, the best GPU for you is always the most expensive one you can afford and nothing has changed there, but the RTX 2060 price cut now puts a lot of distance between this product and its Super sibling. With that in mind, it’s a worthy contender at this price level and for all of its various cutbacks, the KO model still holds up as a decent RTX 2060 overall – and it’s obviously brilliant if you use Blender at all. However, I would check that the KO is actually good value in your neck of the woods. In the UK at least, cheaper RTX 2060 models are available.

3DMark Port Royal – 1080p

RTX 2060

RTX 2060 Super

RTX 2070

RTX 2070 Super

RTX 2080

RTX 2080 Super

RTX 2080 Ti

Generally though, I’m finding PC hardware reviews quite difficult right now. I think the whole process of making any kind of PC component purchasing decision is rather challenging. Investing serious money in a CPU or GPU is generally associated with the idea of not needing to upgrade for another two or three years. Consoles define the baseline and when we don’t know how much performance or what kind of features a next-gen $400/$500 box from Sony or Microsoft will have, and with that in mind, it makes the concept of sinking a fair amount of cash into a PC upgrade at this point in time a real issue. I generally think that the best strategy may be to sit tight unless you really need a big upgrade in the here and now.

The benchmarks speak for themselves though and clearly the RTX 2060 has a lot to offer. However, I do have concerns about the card’s allocation of six gigs of GDDR6 memory, especially when we factor in ray tracing support. Wolfenstein Youngblood grumbles about running DXR with the best texture quality on the 2060, while performance degrades significantly in Battlefield 5 if you’re using DXR in combination with ultra quality textures. I also seem to get sporadic low resolution textures in Control when I ramp up the DXR feature set with DLSS active, upscaling to higher resolutions. The overall outlook for the RTX 2060’s performance is looking good on more modern ray tracing titles, the new DLSS seems to have the frame-rate hit covered while delivering excellent quality but I do wonder whether the VRAM limitation might be a bigger issue further on down the road.

Overall, the RTX 2060 looks a touch more compelling now than it did back in the day – pricing has stabilised, it always has been a good 1080p and 1440p performer – and while you’ve always had access to the RTX feature set, improved ray tracing implementations and a fundamental revamp of DLSS are combining to give impressive results on new titles. I’d like to see ‘DLSS 2.0’ re-engineered back into key games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Metro Exodus and Battlefield 5 – and especially Control. It would be a strong statement of commitment to the entry level RTX power band, it would fulfil some of the promises made back at Gamescom 2018 and potentially, it go a long way in rebutting the critics. In the meantime, all eyes are on the next wave of DXR games and what kind of experience the 2060 is able to deliver with them.

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/02/is-the-entry-level-rtx-fast-enough-for-ray-traced-gaming-%e2%80%a2-eurogamer-net/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=is-the-entry-level-rtx-fast-enough-for-ray-traced-gaming-%25e2%2580%25a2-eurogamer-net

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