The New Mac Commercial

I really had to snicker at this new Mac commercial, where this cool guy is talking about how he's doing all this fun stuff on his Mac like listening to music, organizing photos, watching movies, etc. Then the nerdy PC guy fumbles with this stuff about how the PC can do pie charts. Message: Macs are cool and fun.

But you know, last I checked, you can watch movies, download music (using iTunes no less!), listen to Podcasts, organize photos, etc. etc. on a PC. You can also play videogames on a PC, which isn't really an option on the Mac unless you're okay with only playing like two games a year. I think even Half-Life 2 hasn't made it to the Mac.

And what about upgrading? Don't you love how, with a Mac, instead of pesky upgrading, you get to buy a whole new PC every time? Like, say next year rolls around and DirectX 10 video cards start coming out. Time to upgrade! Oh that's right, you can't upgrade the video card card on a Mac. Or the hard drive. Or the processor or the motherboard or the DVD Drives. Nope, you just gotta buy a whole new computer.

I was a Mac guy for a long time, and yeah, they're alright. In terms of ease of use, maybe a little simpler than PCs when it comes to installing and managing programs as well as updating and fending off viruses. But geez, for the total lack of flexibility, the dearth of software, and the fact that you can do anything "fun" on a PC just as easily... Macs are dumb.

Quick pics

Here are a couple screen captures of Oblivion, without anisotropic filtering enabled, and with 4x anisotropic filtering enabled via Forceware, under "performance and quality settings". The difference in clarity is... well, clear! Click the thumbnails for a full-sized image.

No anisotropic filtering:


4x anisotropic filtering:

Update

Well, the DirectX Tweaker didn't work with Oblivion. I'm pretty sure Oblivion is Direct 3D. Hmm. Enabling triple or quad buffering just made it crash.

Anyway, I did find something that really made Oblivion look worlds better. I seem to recall an option for anisotropic filtering in the game, but it's not in there now. I guess the patch removed it or something. So I went into Forceware and forced 4xAF in the settings. The difference was remarkable. Every little detail just lit up. I'll have to upload some with AF/without AF pics when I get the chance--they're really impressive. I'm still getting mostly smooth frame rates, as long as V-Sync is turned off. It's playable with it on, but it definitely stutters outdoors so I have to scale back some of the details. Most of the time tearing isn't a problem as I'm probably not getting over 75 frames per second that often anyway. It was more obvious in FEAR where I was getting max frame rates of nearly 170.

DirectX Tweaker

I downloaded the DirectX Tweaker today, which is a great little tool to help you tweak out games that use Direct 3D. It just so happens that currently all the games I have for the PC do indeed use Direct 3D.

Essentially, I downloaded it for "triple buffering." Once you get a game running frame rates that are higher than the monitor's refresh rate, you get a "tearing" effect where it seems to take a split second for the image to piece itself together. The remedy for this is to enable an option called V-Sync, which caps the frame rate at the monitor's refresh rate. Problem is, V-Sync takes a hit on the frame rates, sometimes significantly so.

DirectX Tweaker is a tool that allows you to, among many other things, force-enable "triple buffering" in the options. I'm not keen on how exactly how it works, but by doing so you get a nice jump in the frame rates when you have V-Sync enabled. In fact, you can even use quad buffering, which is what I've been using on FEAR, for even better performance.

Unfortunately I still can't run FEAR with AA/AF totally maxed out with V-Sync enabled. However it's actually playable at that setting now--just not optimal. However I can run it with 2xAA/4xAF and it is smooth as butter. It looks much better in motion than it did previously. I'll update this after I've spent some time with Oblivion to see how it affects it, since in Oblivion V-Sync is enabled by default.

Finding the perfect performance

I came across a few new settings tonight in the Forceware options and in-game in FEAR that have a really interesting effect on performance.

We all know that in PC gaming, the trick is to find that optimal balance between performance and quality. The harsh reality is that being able to play in really high resolutions with all details maxed plus AA/AF maxed out is prohibitively expensive for most of us, and as a recent article on [H]ardOCP noted, hardware-limited anyway. Even SLI setups have a hard time playing games with all the bells and whistles at really high resolutions.

But like I said I learned a couple of tricks.. The first trick is a little option in Forceware called Gamma Optimized Anti-Aliasing (GOAA). I don't know how it works exactly, but there's a clear visual improvement. You can use about half the AA for a similar picture.

The other is V-Sync. V-Sync can be enabled or disabled in-game depending on the game, but it's an interesting option. Often, especially in Direct 3D games, you'll notice odd tearing when you move or when lights flash. Depending on the game, it can range from subtle to quite intrusive. V-Sync eliminates this tearing. The downside, unfortunately, is that it takes a hit on the frame rates that is quite noticeable. However, some simple tweaking by enabling GOAA enabled me to keep a similar or even better level of AA at 2x instead of 4x; additionally, I dropped the anisotropic filtering from maximum 16x to a more modest (and frankly indistiguishable) 4x. I could definitely tell when AF was turned off, as distant textures were much blurrier. But I really couldn't tell a difference between 4x and 16x, at least to any significant degree.

Interestingly, what the change of settings really does is take a hit on the maximum frame rate. In my usual test game FEAR, I went from a max of 165 fps to 75. My average dropped from 74 to 58, and my minimum dropped from 43 to 38.

Think about that. My maximum dropped by 90 frames or so, but my minimum dropped a mere five. My average frame rate probably didn't change as much as it first appears; it's just that the average of 165 and 43 is going to be, well, obviously higher the average of 75 and 38. You could almost say that I'm getting more consistent performance. Yes, the frame rate does take a little dip here and there. I've been working on minimizing that by reducing certain details and seeing if I can perceive a difference in quality or smoothness. Overall though, it's still very smooth. An average of roughly 60 frames per second is really the "gold standard" in PC performance. Combat is still fast and furious with lots of crazy particles and such flying around.

But aside from some quirks, the end result is that the game looks better. The tearing was a bit annoying to me, and the smooth panning looks much better. The GOAA clearly improves visual quality as well, and combining these two with some minor adjustments has made it look to my eyes the best it's looked.

SLI = Definitely not worth the money right now

I realized today that I had two 7900 GTs lying around. I realized that this may be one of the few times, if not the only time I would be in possession of such items.

It crossed my mind that since my system's been more stable, I hadn't seen problems as frequently in the last days with my old card. The thought briefly crossed my mind that maybe I could keep both cards. That thought was quickly erased, however, with the reminder that it'd cost me over $350, and that my old card definitely did have some problems that were definitely not caused by any other factors that have been nicely cleared up with its replacement.

But nonetheless I decided to hook up SLI and do a quick test drive in the FEAR test bed. My average framerate in 1280 x960 (all settings max of course) was 101. Pretty cool. Except, my most recent frame rate average with my new card at a newly adjusted overclock of 670/1816 was 74 frames per second. So, a second card would cost $350 and give me 27 more frames per second. Honestly, I expected more. I expected like 130 fps at least.

Keeping in mind also that my current average frame rate in FEAR is but one frame per second below my monitor's maximum refresh rate, and that the human eye can't tell a difference much beyond 50 frames per second, it really doesn't seem worth it.
Double the cost for less than a 40% improvement? That's just dumb.

So, SLI is definitely out of the question unless those cards end up being really, really cheap in a year or so. Double the cost for less than a 40% improvement? That's just dumb.

Quake 4 is not Scottish

And if it's not Scottish... IT'S CRAP!!!

I downloaded the Quake 4 demo today. I had considered purchasing the game when I first bought my PC, and let's just say that if the demo is any indication of what the game is like, I'm glad I didn't.

For starters, especially when I've been playing so much FEAR, Quake 4 looks like crap. The demo takes you through some "outdoor" areas that are basically just standard Doom-style corridors with a shoddy looking bitmap in the background. Animations are good, but the details don't hold up to the games I have--FEAR, Oblivion and Call of Duty 2. All of them look remarkably better than Quake 4.

The gameplay was really predictable and pedestrian as well. Move here, shoot some guys, move on. There were some mildly interesting enemies, but never a sense of strategy. In FEAR, the baddies are clever and they keep you on your toes. In Quake 4, they kind of stand there and maybe run at you, and you just pump a few machine gun rounds in them and they're toast. It was a short demo and I was already bored by the end.

I'm being a little hard on it, sure, but I expected more from id. They used to be the undisputed leaders of the FPS genre, and now it seems like they can't get with the times.

Another new record breaker

The performance climb continues. I think it may be peaked out here. There's not much else I can do at this point to increase performance aside from adding new hardware, which I have no plans of doing any time soon.

Anyway, I got the new 7900 GT Signature Series from eVGA today. What's odd is that when I installed coolbits, the frequency was actually lower--550/790. Not sure if it was a mistake or if eVGA was trying to pull a fast one. Oddly, after a failed attempt to overclock to 115, I decreased the PCI-E frequency to default and saw no performance loss with my new card--which leads me to believe that my previous performance gain was either the result of better system stability or just a quirk with my old card.

In any case, it doesn't matter. The card overclocked beautifully--all the way to 680/911. I had gotten the core clock higher, all the way to 717, but after a couple of hours I started seeing minor artifacting. At its current setting, it's considerably faster than a much-pricier 7900 GTX, and it shows in the frame rates. Running the FEAR test bed with all settings at maximum, I got these numbers:

Minimum: 42
Average: 73
Maximum: 177

Frankly there are stock 7900 GT SLI setups that don't perform this well. The combination of my hyperclocked processor and card overclock has produce absolutely phenomenal performance. At stock speeds, even with the 7900 GT SS, I had stuttering in FEAR and Oblivion when they were maxed out. After all the tweaking I've done, my average frame rate in FEAR has soared from 25-30 to over 70. These past few weeks have been crazy, with lots of obstacles and frustrations and even some hardware changes, but right now I'm ready to say that I'm done tweaking the system. It's absolutely soaring, and I'm ready to get back to some great gaming.

For the record

Current specs, stock versus current overclocked settings (notated by the "@" sign).

Motherboard: ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe, @ 242 FSB, 110 PCI-E, 1.54 vcore
Processor: AMD 4000+ 2.4ghz, @ 2.9ghz
Memory: 2GB OCZ Platinum PC4000 500mhz 3-3-2-8, @ 1:1 with FSB
Video card: eVGA Signature Series 7900 GT 600/1600 @ 680/1822
Cooling: Zalman CNPS9500
Drives:
1) Western Digital 250GB SATA3 w/ 16MB cache
2) Mitsumi Floppy Drive
3) Sony 16x DVD+- R/W
Case: Lian-Li PC-6070

Status: stable and bitchin'.

Holy Fucking Shit!

I installed the new memory today, and I managed to bump the processor up to 2.9ghz. I also did something that I hadn't done previously: I increased the CPU voltage by enabling the vCore overvoltage option in the BIOS. This seems to have improved performance significantly. My FEAR testbed went from an average of 33 frames per second to an average of 43.

However, the most remarkable improvement in graphics performance came from a very tiny adjustment -- namely, I overclocked the PCI-E frequency by 10% to 110. In one test with the FEAR test bed, my average frame rate jumped to 64 frames per second with a maximum of a whopping 154. Minimum was just 38. In 1024x768, the results were even more impressive: average of 90 frames per second, maximum of 221, minimum of 63.

Further overclocking of the PCI-E only caused instability. 10% seems to be the sweet spot.

Just for kicks I tried to bump it all the way to 3.0 ghz, but it looks like that ain't gonna happen without some pricey cooling. Frankly though, my goal was always 2.8ghz, and since I may get to 2.9ghz, I gotta say I'm pretty happy. The performance increase is great.

However, I should add that through all this overclocking, I've definitely had some headaches. Granted, I'm a noob, but I gotta respect the plug-and-play ease of use of a console. Troubleshooting sucks. But, in the end, I'm very satisfied.

Pushing the system still

I've been having some very minor errors here and there that, while they aren't intrusive, they're a little odd and I think they may be related to the memory being overclocked. I also think I have a little more room to kick the processor up a tad, but I hate messing with memory overclocking because it's so damn tedious.

So, I've done what I'd originally planned to do: buy faster memory. I'm not sure why I settled for the Corsair XMS 3500, but I realized pretty soon it wasn't what I wanted. I liked OCZ's memory, and preferred their forums and customer service over Corsair's.

Here's the kicker. I bought OCZ Platinum PC 4000, which is 500mhz memory that runs at 3-3-2-8, making it easily the lowest-latency 500mhz memory on the market. Now, if I were running it at 500mhz, I'd be running my processor at 3.0ghz, and frankly it's doubtful I'll get it there. Temperatures are good now, but they're creeping up there (I use ASUS's handy AI Overclocking software to monitor temperatures), and all I can do is crank the Zalman up a notch for better cooling. So odds are that I will be running the memory at around 470-480mhz. Memory errors will be a non-issue and there won't be any tedious overclocking. But what makes this such a boon is that I'll actually be saving in the neighborhood of $50. Hmm... upgrade the memory, get fewer errors and more processing speed, and save some cash? How could I not?

Frankly, I really don't understand why people overclock memory. Buying faster memory usually isn't that much more expensive and sometimes, like in my case, it can actually be cheaper depending on the brand. Unlike overclocking a CPU, which is relatively easy (just increase the FSB and maybe up the voltage a tad), overclocking memory is a lengthy trial-and-error process. OCZ's PC 3200 Platinum is $180; their PC 4000 Platinum is $220. I say, spring the extra cash and save yourself the hours of testing and troubleshooting.

Also, after some snafus getting it through, I've finally gotten the RMA processed for my video card. This week should be good--new memory, new video card... hopefully I can crank the CPU up to 2.9ghz and get a solid overclock on the new video card (well, presuming it works). I'm excited!