those who are in the know know that when it comes to measuring the
performance of a graphics card FPS is
just part of the story i mean you could
have all the FPS in the world but if you had an extremely high latency from your
mouse click to the graphics card processing it outputting it and actually
seeing the photons hit your eyeballs that wouldn't make for a very good
gaming experience furthermore efficiency matters if you
had two graphics cards that performed the same but one of them sucked back 500
watts and outputs so much heat in your room that you're like
gaming like this well surely you'd rather have the more
efficient one now we've tried a variety
of different methods of measuring these things in the past everything from clamp
meters for power to makey makeys with high-speed cameras for input latency and
sometimes it actually worked out okay but more often than not it required more
setup than we can put into every single GPU on every single test bench
fortunately that all changes today meet
NVIDIA's homegrown tools they're calling
these the ldat and the p cat
and we're gonna see a if they work and b we're gonna discuss
whether or not you can trust them glasswire is the tool that shows you
which apps are slowing down your connection in real time it's used by
security pros to monitor for malware block bandwidth wasters and detect
suspicious activity get 25 off using offer code Linus at the link below
let's start with ldap the latency and
display analysis tool it's a rather unassuming looking
logitech g203 prodigy but wait you need
to look closely here there's actually a second wire coming out of this thing and
if we follow it down to the end we find
a photo sensor
it's embedded in an unassuming looking little 3d printed housing and that wire
from the mouse plugs right into the front of it a little something like that
so then how is this supposed to work
like so when you place this puppy on the screen
it detects changes in light output so that means we're actually using a
similar method to something like the one made by leo bodnar but fundamentally
different in two ways one instead of taking an HDMI input to
measure display latency we are actually taking a mouse input to measure end to
end mouse to photon latency
two it's software controlled from back to front so through that we can set up
an auto fire mode that is completely unattended as long as something on
screen changes every time the mouse clicks we can repeat our tests
indefinitely to get a reading of potentially hundreds or even thousands
of data points within a single minute of testing giving us an extremely accurate
result it even lets us see raw sensor data so we can determine where the best
place on the screen is to place the sensor you guys might not know this but
screens actually draw like this not just
like randomly not all at once yeah dead center is fine um ideally what it would
be is like say you're measuring a game so if it's a first person shooter
then you would be putting it over the muzzle where the muzzle flash would be
press the button so why don't we go with my my personal favorite we'll go with
that that cs go well there's you're missing a step oh i see there was
another cable in that box yeah and it's still in there oh yeah wait what's this
for that plugs into the light sensor well let's fire up the program first
that would be on the desktop it's just in a folder called ldap ldap oh yeah i
can measure audio as well it's got a little 3.5 millimeter audio jack in there so it can measure audio latency
in theory you could measure any audio latency with that like not even a computer like
a tv or something so if you keep it in free running mode then if as you move
that around uh there you go see there was a little
luminous change whoa look at that
so if you put a brighter window over that or some kind of
yeah like task manager whoa cool yeah so you can actually set the
activation point for what luminance it should like pick up on uh-huh and uh
yeah it'll just do it it's super fast sensor
that's cool you can also add the uh mouse button as
well with that second option so that it it actually will detect when
you click the mouse this mode is mostly useful for setting things up the first
time and that histogram is what you get after you get the latency calculation
right now if you wanted to get something that's actually a latency calculation
uh put the window for uh ldap in front of the sensor now click on the window
like somewhere other than a control
oh cool yeah so you can just do that it'll pick
it up how how long it took for it to change so
what it's doing is it's actually sending the pulse to make the click down the
cable that's connected to the mouse it's not actually like using Windows or
anything else to make the click it's it's all in in the hardware so you didn't have to have the software running
on this computer not only does this automate the process and make it so that
we can run these tests without a secondary pc or like camera capture
setup it's going to save so much time it even exports in csv form which we can
then import into excel and turn into nice little charts for you guys
but it doesn't tell us
what is contributing to the overall input lag it just tells us the total so
what we're measuring here is everything debounce usb polling rate operating
system processing delay driver processing delay game engine processing
delay render to display delay and then finally of course the pixel response
time of our display which isn't to say
though that it's useless because if we've got this data it means that we can
change other variables one at a time and just see if the
overall delay gets better but it's got
NVIDIA right on the box can we trust it
yeah i mean it's just a mouse with wires coming out of the button that goes into
the sensor you don't even have to plug it into the same computer it has nothing
to do with NVIDIA so yeah i don't see any reason why not
cool all right how about this other tool this
is the pcat or power capture analysis
tool you can tell these are named by the engineers right this is probably the
most interesting thing i've seen in a
long time when it comes to measuring
graphics parts tools to accurately measure power
consumption are not easily accessible being either very expensive or very rare
or even worse both methods we've used in the past such as
kilowatts don't accurately measure power draw because power supply inefficiencies
can creep in to say nothing of the rest of the system's power consumption during
the test even worse are the software derived methods you might use at home
because a each vendor has a different idea of how to measure total board power
and b you're counting on them to report it correctly
never go up against a sicilian when death is on the line
which brings us then to these two pcbs one with a pci express
connector and card edge and another with
a whole whack ton of pci express power
connectors as you guys might have guessed
these allow us to measure the power flowing through each of these connectors
that is both from the power supply cables that
come into the graphics card and through the motherboard itself with up to three
eight pin pci express 12v cables
now on this puppy right here we've got a removable OLED display that takes both
the feed from the pci express board and the power interposers and spits out
statistics and the current power draw NVIDIA claims it's within 0.25 of their
oscilloscopes as far as accuracy goes so with this we can accurately measure what
the real world power draw is for any pci express card actually not just a
graphics card let's go ahead and try it out here this is one of those things
that as a manufacturer you have to have the absolute utmost confidence in your
products in order to produce because it's the kind of thing that
obviously both AMD and NVIDIA have had internally
for years but if you go ahead and you make all these
tools available to you know every yahoo you know hardware reviewer out there
then not just today but for years forever to come they're going to have
the means to hold you accountable for your crappy products so you basically
have to think you know not only do i have the best product
today but i'm gonna have the best product forever and i want everyone to
know about it to produce tools like this and send them out because i've asked for
years like you guys obviously have all these measurement tools why don't you
just provide them to us because you have them anyway and the answer is always
like uh let me get back to you
and yet here we are this is freaking awesome
how replaceable is this Anthony is this just something NVIDIA's going to sell on
their webstore or like is it reviewers only or for now it's a
reviewers-only kind of thing it's just something that they've kind of built upon out of their lab that's why you see
the 3d printed components but they haven't ruled out selling it to
consumers if there's enough demand for it so uh
maybe let them know down in the comments if you want to see that just just make
sure that they're on the input side versus the other output side and there's
a wire on each end all right so
let's just put that puppy i don't know like
brilliant so they include up to a triple slot
of little dude adama jigs that you can
screw in here to your case so you can actually mount it securely apparently
it's a standard item for mcmaster car you can actually just order them
yourself if you need a different threading for your screws oh okay
uh well which i think may actually be necessary in our case all right we're
just huh we're going straight yolo here boys
oh yeah no problem piece of cake
oh the display is upside down this is why we didn't give Linus the
tools okay okay here we go total power 14 watts
right now dang oh i should plug in an HDMI cable
yeah power usage probably go up a little bit with the HDMI cable in yeah the good
news is the HDMI cable should anchor it to the back of the case here so oh
that's not a good solution what do you what do you work at Linus
tech tips or something what's wrong with you listen we deal in jank around here
right of course you're not stuck just looking at this little tiny display down
here as freaking cool as that is there's an accompanying pcat utility v 1.1 that
like the ldap one can log to csv files and additionally provide real-time power
graphs look at this not just total but
on a per-source basis so on our two eight pins here you can
see we're doing somewhere in the neighborhood of four
watts or so and then where is it yep 12 volt pci express so
that's coming through the slot we're doing about four or five watts so it's actually equally balanced across all of
them so then i can just fire up furmark right
yeah and if you wanted to have all of those different uh metrics on the graph
there was actually check boxes down at the bottom right there and that'll just
throw them on there for you even just the like the Windows
hardware GPU acceleration of the ui
will give you these little spikes when you do stuff like watch i'm going to
launch fur mark and it's like oh 40 watts hey we got to draw this window are
you okay everybody calm down now
250 watts and i guess we can
believe it because that's about what we would expect out of a board like this
and i mean this is just this is just power wires like it would
have no way whatsoever of knowing if we have a Radeon or a g-force or a
Intel
not yet but later you know at some point yeah it's completely agnostic as far as
it's concerned it can just measure power from whatever source doesn't matter if
it's a graphics card or a sound card or a network card
and just figure out what the power draw is we are going to be able to do the coolest like power draw charts for you
guys and it gets even better because finally both
of these tools integrate into frame view 1.1 to show latency and frames dropped
by the display and power statistics from
pcat now that the overlay has vulcan support plus we've got integration of
these other tools there's actually very little that we wish that it did
that it doesn't already directx 9 and 10 overlay next please and thank you
let's go ahead and take a crack at this campaign so we've jumped to 4k and we're gonna
see how this puppy performs here how much power it draws
we're gonna know for sure
broken ARM thing in your mouth boom broken head
you fell off a cliff take that
oh that guy threw a thing at me don't do that anyway that's not the point today
the point is we are sucking back around
250 water rooney's with this thing oh wow it's got right it's got the little
display on it i don't even have to like all tab out i can see it i can see it
right there i love this this is this is freaking
cool and i'm sure that if the price is reasonable a lot of enthusiasts are
going to want to get their hands on these things come on NVIDIA put it on
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um what are we thinking for thumbnail