The WAN Show - Tech & Gaming Talk Fridays at 16:30 Pacific Time
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2015-05-07
·
20,897 words · ~104 min read
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all right guys welcome to the WAN Show we've got our special guest Ryan Shrout
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with us here this week and you may or may not have noticed that he has
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completely taken the place of that guy that I have evidently once and for all
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finally fired finally it's about time
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right i know right he's been with me for like 3 years now it's actually That's
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too long kind of incredible yeah yeah i mean that's that's too long for I I
0:27
should just let everyone in my life know that I've had a relationship with for more than 3 years like wife see you
0:33
siblings see you eventually kids right
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sorry three years that's it that's it yeah yeah my my son's going to make it
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to to three in you know the next sort of seven months or so time to hit the road
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kiddo get a job or we're gone
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all right guys so we've got a bunch of great topics for you we are going to I'm
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assuming Ryan's going to be with me on this but maybe he's going to play devil's advocate for me over here but I
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am planning to lay into Ubisoft over the
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whole 30 FPS is more so yes that's that's the smile I was looking for
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30 FPS so cinematic so we are definitely going to be tackling that we're also
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going to be chatting about NVIDIA's brand new 970M and 980M mobile graphics
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cards that are surprisingly interesting
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i mean usually the mobile graphics card comes out and it's kind of
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like this time around there's actually really something to say hp is splitting
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up into two companies and we've got another really good one here that I'm
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scrolling through this list as fast as I can to find cuz I can't remember what
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the bloody thing was right HTC launches two selfie optimized phones so we'll
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have some chat and we'll definitely do some Twitter interaction on that one
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find out what you guys think of selfie phones but in the meantime here's the
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intro if it ever
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rolls oh there's no audio again i can
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never remember which one has the audio i'll just
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singot you know it's actually it's hard to talk with um with my voice in my ear
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with a slight delay it's impossible to sing
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so you get yourself back in your ear right now when you when you do this yes
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I do hold on let me just uh thank our show sponsors our first sponsor today is
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linda.com visit linda.com/wanshow to actually get a
2:35
pretty super sweet free trial of their excellent courses kind of a funny story
2:40
we had a stream that we did um earlier this week where someone who actually
2:45
founded a potential competitor to some of linda.com services called them out by
2:50
name as an excellent service for learning things whether it's programming
2:54
or digital photography or whatever else the case may be our second sponsor today
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and it helps if I don't lay them over top of each other like that is Phantom
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Glass their little tagline is the last
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screen protector you'll ever need and I totally disagree with that because you
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actually do need different screen protectors if you ever change your phone
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but it is the last screen protector you'll ever need for your current model
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of phone because it's made of Gorilla Glass 3 just like the screen of your
3:23
phone probably is if you've got a good quality phone it's extremely difficult
3:27
to scratch it's olophobic and it uses a fantastic like nano BS thing that they
3:34
got going on there to somehow be completely bubble free very cool stuff
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so I think that's pretty much it for all that me doing nothing but talking
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constantly why don't we jump right into Assassin's Creed dev thinks the industry
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is dropping the 60fps standard this was
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posted on the forum by the crazed child
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and there's actually uh there's a couple good articles there's one from techraar.com there's one from GameSpot
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i'm just going to pop these up here so you guys can have a look while uh Ryan
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gives his thoughts is Is 30 FPS enough is it more cinematic Ryan no that's
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that's pretty much a a crap excuse for
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uh not being able to render at 60 frames per second obviously i mean if you
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really wanted to make it cinematic you just drop it all the way down to 24 frames per second right like if you're
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going to if you're going to claim that's the reason then go ahead and and do it
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all the way damn it Ryan take your take your logic and and go go back to the
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Midwest or M East or wherever it is you live that's pretty close it's pretty
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It's close enough i mean anybody who has actually used a machine that's locked at
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30 and used a machine that's locked at 60 frames per second can easily tell the
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difference like it's that is not a debate really anymore and um to to have
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a developer of a major game kind of come out and say "Oh we don't really think it's important." What what's the exact
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quote here you don't gain that much from 60 frames per second and it doesn't look
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like the real thing it's a it's a bit like The Hobbit movie that's that's
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crazy like that's painful i mean okay
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the the thing about the whole cinematic look argument is one there's motion blur
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okay and this is something that I think a lot of people either don't understand
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or do understand and hope that other
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people don't understand because if you wanted Okay so
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motion blur is a natural effect of the
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iris of a camera opening and closing iris or shutter or what whatever it is
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you want to call it and what happens
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with games is there is no iris there is
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no camera there is no natural motion blur now the thing is if you have enough
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GPU horsepower you can actually add fico
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motion blur after the fact to the game if you really want that cinematic look
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but dropping the frame rate isn't the answer because unless you have motion
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blur you're not getting any of that effect and even if you do have some at a
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lower frame rate you're getting like I said a cheapo after the-act effect not
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proper motion blur that makes it look properly smooth yeah and and you got to
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think like all these TVs and all these displays um are are being built for
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lower persistence you know uh which takes away some of that inherent
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blurring uh effect that would be native with some of these displays and monitors
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right or TVs whatever you happen to be playing it on so um it it just it
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doesn't make any sense to me like the the whole the whole the whole debate of
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why is it running at 900p or or 1600 by
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900 on both consoles and then oh yeah it's also going to run at 30 frames per
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second because of it 60 isn't good for a shooter uh or whatever this bull crap
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they're talking about is it I mean it just doesn't make any sense like every
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everybody who's a PC gamer a PC gamer who's looked at this quote or reads this
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quote they all aim for above 60 and it's
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not because we're all crazy it's because there's actually valid reasons to want
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to run at higher frame rates so I don't know people and the thing is I like this
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game is coming out on the PC it's are they going to lock it at 30 frames per
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second on the PC i bet they don't for a better experience i bet they don't i bet
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if NVIDIA has their say because it's a it's a GameWorks title it will
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definitely not be locked at 30 frames per second can you can you imagine
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NVIDIA putting a Game Works and like way it's meant to be played in front of a 30
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FPS logs title that would be that would that now that would be worth controversy
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and discussion right so you know it's it's limitations of the consoles that's
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why it's going at 30 frames per second so speaking of the Okay speaking of the
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controversy and how I mean you just sound exasperated just talking about
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this topic because we've been around and around and around again why is Lionus
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making me talk about this stupid damn non-debate that has nothing to do with
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reality at all and the answer is because
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Ubisoft keeps on digging why don't they
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just tell their devs to shut the hell up and let this thing kind of settle a
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little bit what are they doing there there are there are plenty of console
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games that are locked at 30 okay and there are reasons for it because they
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don't want to drop visual fidelity in order to get to 60 frames per second and
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on a TV and on a console where you're kind of you're you know you don't want
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to have VSYNC issues you either have to run at 30 or you have to run at 60 and
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anything in between that is a really big problem so there there are games that
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run at 30 and it's fine that they're not great experiences but they also don't
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come out and say "Well 30 is really what we targeted." Because it's not nobody
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targets 30 right no it's absolutely
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absolutely ridiculous um people are telling me that the audio might be out
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of sync which is very very strange um oh
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no I've got other people saying it's just fine so I think it might be a uh
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yeah I think it might be a bit of an issue apparently there's a very slight
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delay on source so you guys might want to turn yourselves down to uh to
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something else if you're having a little bit of trouble so if it's just me let me
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know no I've got a lot of people do about it but got a lot of people saying
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it's fine uh so I'm not going to not going to can the stream now all right so
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I guess I I'll just see if there's anything else here that we didn't mention like yes I'm extremely
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disappointed that the the upcoming Assassin's Creed is going to run at 900p
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although 900p I find is less of an issue
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for me than 30 FPS because frankly I
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didn't notice that much of a difference with I think it was Battlefield 4 no no
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I think it was the last Assassin's Creed that launched at 900p on PS4 then got a
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patch almost immediately to 1080p um
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didn't really notice the difference compared to 720p but 30 FPS really is
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very noticeable and Ubisoft needs to just stop talking immediately about
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this um on on on that note uh the Halo 2
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Anniversary Edition campaign also will not be running in 1080p uh it's going to
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run at 1328x 1080 60fps though Ryan
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given that the technological constraints here are that they appear to have to run
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both game or both sound and physics
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engines simultaneously um do you think this is an okay
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compromise killing some horizontal resolution for the sake of 60 FPS so
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they're they're taking away horizontal resolution um I'd like to see what that
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looks like visually I guess how how much of a of a of a theater effect are you
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getting on either side i mean I don't
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know probably i mean so this is the Halo 2
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anniversary yeah I don't know i think
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maybe you give the consumer an option um so they're rendering both in the
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background so you can do what they did with the first one which where you have that one button push to swap between
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them right which was a really cool effect but if it's if it's accounting
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for that performance issue then I'd rather just say "Hey don't bother
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rendering the other physics other
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graphics other audio in the background just let me actually run at 19 by10."
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Because I mean it's kind of embarrassing that the Xbox One won't be able to run
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Halo 2 at 1080p uh regardless of what
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the reason is you you would think they would be able to get that full resolution out of that so you you would
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think that wouldn't you
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silly Ryan Trout i mean here I am looking at things like graphics
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performance and gigaflops and and realizing that hey you've maybe you made
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the wrong decisions on these consoles as it turns out maybe you should have spent
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a little bit more money on hardware and you know I've got to wonder if they
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spent less money on hardware because they knew it was going to be a short
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life cycle or if we're going to end up with a short life cycle because they
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realized after the fact that they didn't spend enough money on hardware and then
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the truly baffling thing about it is that Microsoft and Sony at exactly the
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same time spent not enough money on hardware in pretty much exactly the same
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way yep i guess that's all there is to say isn't
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there yeah i mean it's it's it's they both did it and and you know
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you can't blame AMD AMD just built what they asked for right but they could have
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asked for more hardware both companies so yeah um I think I had something else
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to say about that but I guess that's uh I guess that's pretty much all there is
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to it i mean one thing that they said was that they were running at 720p and
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everything was fine 720ps 60 FPS uh they
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wanted to push it further so you know they they managed to get to 1328x 1080
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but would you would you rather than
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running an upscaled resolution be given the option to run a native resolution
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even if it's a lower one
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uh yeah I think so i I I'm curious how you upscale 1328 by 1080 like I don't
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like I don't really understand how you could how you would able be able to do
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that um you know algorithmically I guess
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because you're you're simply just cutting off sides of the of this of the
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window right so if they are rendering at 1328 by 852 or something odd like that
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that was of the same aspect ratio then I might believe that they'd be able to
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upscale it well as it is now I just I feel like they're just going to have black bars on the side but surely you
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wouldn't do that that's not what they're doing they were really clear about that
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it will definitely be some kind of an upscaling
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huh whatever that ends up looking like hope they're not just zooming in or
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something either i don't know it might be worthwhile to do a um like actually
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it might be worthwhile to to to check out this game do some do some capture of
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it and and have a look at it i mean it'd be convenient if we actually got a PC
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version of the game so that we could really compare it against something meaningful but uh weren't there rumors
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that that was going to happen wasn't there rumors i don't think there's
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anything confirmed yet but Twitch chat is pretty great about uh correcting me
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about these things if I ever get anything I get anything wrong the chat
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rooms are great for that aren't they yeah they really are um speaking of the
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chat they've been giving me a really hard time about launching right into the
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show and not explaining who the hell you are and not explaining where the hell
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Luke is so I'll do both of those things guys luke has taken his first decent
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vacation pretty much since he started working with me so he and I went over to
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Germany i was actually there and back in just over 4 days worth of hours um but
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Luke and Brandon both uh decided to stick around so we toured the Cherry
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Tour you know the guys that make mechanical keyboard switches and we
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toured the Sennheiser did I say toured the Cherry Tour factory and we toured
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the Sennheiser factory as well we actually did Oh man we got a really
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great opportunity to uh to film the
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assembly process station by station of the HD800 headphones and Brandon got
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some amazing footage of it we are going to bring that to you guys everything
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from just stamping out diaphragms all
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the way to putting it onto artificial ears and then like an artificial head
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going on a track into a into a noise isolated chamber where it t Yeah no it's
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freaking amazing where they take they test every single unit and then record
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the the um the response curve really
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really cool we're going to bring all that content to you guys but I jetted
15:34
back here and Luke is sticking around in Germany for a week and a half and
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Brandon's with him for a week as well so I am on my own for a couple weeks worth
15:43
of WAN shows so I that leads us to this poor substitute for Luke this is Ryan
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Trout from PC Perspective maybe you want to introduce yourself here because I'm
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clearly not doing a great job the poor sub uh the poor substitute is uh owner
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operator at PC perspective pcpurro.com and basically I review PC hardware for a
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living and I have for the last god 15 years oh god competitor get rid of him
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yeah click hang up hang up hang up uh so
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we the website has been around forever we used to cover just AMD hardware for
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until like 2004ish or something yeah we were
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AMDMBB.com uh focused on like AMD processors and
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motherboards uh and then I didn't even know that that's before my time i always
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knew you as PC PC Perspective yeah 2004 we launched as PC Perspective basically
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I graduated college and I said "All right if I'm going to actually make this a job let's let's try to make this a
16:34
job." So I've been doing that since then and uh we've got a good team of people
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that that do good work and uh I'm
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practically family with Lionus now i mean we have we've hula hooped together
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and uh uh also done the limbo together
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so it's it's like a bonding thing that we did so um that's what I do i we test
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hardware graphics cards processors SSDs all that random crap
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so yeah i mean I guess the the thing the way that I would I I made that joke
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about us being competitors before we're not really i mean Ryan has a podcast i
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have a podcast uh Ryan makes videos i make videos okay hold on a second here
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no okay the main difference is that Ryan's going to get more nuts and bolts
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into if you actually want to know how the SM within an NVIDIA GPU work and how
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that impacts the way that it's going to perform in this game versus that game or
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with this setting dialed up versus that setting up ryan gets really nitty-gritty
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into the details with those kinds of technologies whereas I see ourselves as
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more of a a general overview style of of
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of content so it's just different strokes for different folks and the one
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thing that we definitely know is that stroking is good so let's
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go yeah you pretend you don't know what I'm talking about over there i got a
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monkey so speaking of getting into nuts and bolts this was originally posted on
17:59
the Linus Tech Tips forum by WTO 165 thanks WTO you get a shout out guys make
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sure you're posting all the latest awesome news in the Linus Tech Tips forum after of course searching to make
18:09
sure no one's already posted it uh cuz you will get shoutouts on the show and
18:14
uh there are articles all over the place about this of course PC perspective have
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you got you you guys have covered them i'm sorry I haven't I've been traveling i haven't looked at your site for which
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this this MSI graphics do you have one i I think I I
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think I have the one that they're talking about here is this Oh no uh sorry i jumped to the next topic 980m
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and 970M oh yeah yeah yeah i actually have one of those in here too okay see
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awesome which one's that oh you got the Oh that's the MSI GT72 i don't have one
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of those i've got an Aoris X7 Pro and
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then I've got the G751 from ASUS yep so
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um the X7 Pro is one impressive piece of machinery dual 970M and SLI
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nice nice this I mean this is kind of the more traditional single GPU variant
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of it uh it's actually it's a big machine it's a 17.3 in machine but it's
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it's not very heavy like you can tell it's not overly bogged down by heat
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sinks yeah that's the one MSI is using the um the magnesium alloy shell on
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right okay yeah I think I think it is yeah we just got it in a couple days ago
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so um but it's it's been pretty impressive performance-wise so let's
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talk about it so GTX 980M and 970M
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NVIDIA is touting them they had this wonderful graph at the editor's day and
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NVIDIA is touting them as the closest
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mobile variants to their equivalent
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desktop variants ever
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and would you say from your testing that that is a valid statement from NVIDIA uh
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I think it is i I I think that graphic they showed is maybe uh a little bit
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skewed just because Is it ever not well
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exactly but it's a little bit closer together on that graph than it actually
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turns out to be i mean don't get me wrong the 980M is still an awesome part
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uh especially considering you know its power efficiency and that's what makes
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it great in laptops but it's I mean there's still definitely a gap like the
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the GTX 970 desktop is faster than the GTX 980M mobile right so of course that
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means that there's going to be a 15 20 25% gap between the 980M and the 980
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itself so I mean it's still it's still really good but it's not it's you know
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their naming scheme still throws it off some that and I think part of the issue
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for NVIDIA is that whenever they compare anything they're going to be using a
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reference 970M which is a part that doesn't exist so the only 970 that I was
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or sorry 970M uh a reference 970 this is
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so confusing the only 970s that I'm
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aware of are aftermarket ones most of which are overclocked and the way that
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GPU Boost 2.0 works is even if you were to underclock your card to a reference
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clock speed that card might still overclock itself to something that a
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reference card wouldn't have achieved so it makes comparing 970M which could also
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be a non-reference design because to my knowledge board partners or notebook
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partners are able to kind of play around with with settings there so comparing
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one thing that's non-reference to another thing that's non-reference compared to NVIDIA's graph which is
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reference to reference I mean who even knows what's going on yeah it's it's
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interesting because if you if you looked through all that information on the mobile parts they never give you a TDP
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uh for the GPUs and the reason is it's not that they don't have a number uh it
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is that each notebook like the GT72 or the
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ASUS machine that you have like they're allowed to tweak those clock speeds
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individually to make sure they are within the thermal envelope of whatever
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uh you know heat sink and fan combination they're using in the laptop
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so there there's really not a reference clock speed for the mobile parts like
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there is on the desktop parts um because it is kind of a casebyase basis so yeah
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I think you'll see different clocks throughout the notebooks i mean that was
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the other thing I noticed was that they only specify a base clock they actually
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don't have a boost clock in the spec it just says base clock is this plus quote
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unquote boost mhm and that's all we really know about it yeah you got to
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open up something like GPUZ or something that will give you what it is what the
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uh the firmware of the GPU is actually set at for its typical boost but again
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you've been doing this long enough the typical boost does not really tell you
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what the boost clock is going to be at anyway right it just gives you some
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minimum that it won't go below unless of
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special cases right it's all very complicated yeah unless of special cases
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in which case it will go below yeah and then we don't know really anything of
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what's going on unfortunately and then we have that thing called the base clock
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so that's actually what we mean so um but I I have to say so we we ran some we
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ran a bunch of benchmarks the article is not up yet on the website but the GT72
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with that 980M um is at the wall i think
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we're we're pulling like 200 to 210 watts with the AC plugged in uh and
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that's that's not a lot of power considering using a quad core hyperthreaded part you got a 980M
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running at probably 1.1 gigahertz at its typical type of clock speed that it's
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running at and it's got a 1080p screen and there's basically no game that maybe
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except for Crisis 3 at its top settings that can really make it you know work
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overboard to to render at 1080p so it's it's actually pretty impressive and the
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fans don't get super loud and uh it's it's a pretty good mobile gaming
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experience I think so far now speaking of the mobile gaming experiences uh
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experience is this a bit of a strange trend to you i've noticed that for all
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of the sudden we were seeing 3K and 4K
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notebook displays and we were getting
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860M or in some cases 870M in the in the
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case of stuff like the ASX 3 or the Razer Blade and then all of a sudden we
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get these super powerful GPUs in the 970M and the 980M that could really
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drive a 3K display properly and it seems
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like everyone all at the same time met in a back room somewhere and decided to
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bail and go back to 1080p what the heck happened i I think the reality is is
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neither the 980M or the 970M could really push a 3K display okay not in
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Crisis 3 but Shadow of Mordor high
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details maybe not max maybe maybe you'd be able to and I think that's what you
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know from from NVIDIA's point of view they want to be able to say max out
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everything on this laptop right and so 1080p is the right resolution for that
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and again you're talking about a 17inch
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screen that is a little bit further away from you maybe uh and so 1080p just kind
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of makes sense now you could hook it up to an external display which we did um
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you could this has DisplayPort connections on it we hooked up uh that
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ASUS swift G-Sync monitor and it works
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Right so if you want to use an external display for higher resolutions you can
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um but I just I don't know i I didn't see the benefit of those ultra high
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resolution notebooks really because in Windows it's not very useful because you
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you've got to turn up the scaling to a certain amount so that you pick so that
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your icons and your text is actually readable and then in games um you know
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there's when your native resolution is 25 by 14 or or 32 by 16 or whatever it
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was whatever that one works to and you downscale it to 1080p it's not going to
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look as sharp as if it were running on a native 1080p screen so I'm sure we'll
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see those and something like a machine that has 2980s in it would be kind of
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the perfect candidate for that yeah a two and a half two and a halfK display
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with two 980ms is probably an excellent sweet spot i mean I guess the thing that
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it just baffles me that we get these underpowered notebooks with these high
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resolution displays and then we get these overpowered notebooks with
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probably the right display even though really that's not NVIDIA's messaging
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about it at all i mean their slide deck is that 900 series M is suitable for
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1440p but I I think that the actual
26:09
designs coming out reflect the true reality of what's going on and I mean
26:14
you've played around with dynamic super resolution correct mhm so do you think
26:18
that dynamic super resolution is a good balance then if you're going to have a
26:22
1080p display and you just take more samples yep on on a notebook yep we ran
26:27
uh the the Dark Souls 2 demonstration portion or whatever on that on this MSI
26:32
laptop using DSR and it looks great skyrim with DSR looks great um so if
26:37
there are games where you have that capability to run at higher resolution
26:40
you can still do that and take advantage of it on the 1080p display it's kind of
26:44
it is kind of a really nice almost perfect setup for that right so if
26:50
you've got more horsepower down sample render at 4K down sample if you don't
26:55
then you've got a native 1080p display for it uh and and it works out pretty
26:59
well so I guess that's pretty much all there is to say about them they're
27:03
they're power efficient they support all the same features as the as the desktop
27:07
ones i think the only really disappointing thing about it for me is
27:12
that I feel like a lot of the talk about
27:15
um oh you know the desktop and mobile are getting much closer is is spin
27:20
because I really feel like the desktop could have been further ahead if NVIDIA
27:25
hadn't started back with the GTX 680 um
27:29
started kind of releasing their mid-tier chip as a flagship and then their true
27:35
flagship as the next generation flagship chip and now extended this pattern where
27:39
we're not getting full-on Maxwell but it's being sold to us as a top tier chip
27:44
so NVIDIA is effectively getting two gens out of each architecture in terms
27:48
of the numbering scheme when we used to get a full new series of cards with a
27:52
full new architecture or at the very least a die shrink each time they said
27:56
that they were releasing something new to us yeah i mean and it that that's
28:00
that's that's definitely the case but it's it's I don't think they have a
28:03
choice yeah it's a result of the manufacturing process issues that are
28:07
there right it's it's well we're stuck on 28 nmter what can we do and also keep
28:11
in mind that that Maxwell is aimed at
28:14
power efficiency right like that design was really aimed at getting the most
28:19
performance per watt and when you can do that um by definition right because of
28:24
the way physics works you know your GPU
28:27
on your notebook and on your desktop are going to compress they're going to get a little bit further right because that
28:32
sweet spot for performance for the 980 is 165 watts where for the 980M it's
28:37
like 120 watts or whatever it actually is so right um whereas on the you know
28:43
the GTX 680 it was 200 210 watts versus
28:46
110 watts so um it's it it's getting
28:50
closer but I think it's not nearly as close as they would like you to believe
28:54
based on their fancy marketing graphs i mean I did find some games where it was
28:59
only a 10 15% delta but these were situations like Tomb Raider where I
29:04
really wasn't that limited by the uh by the GPU itself i was more limited by the
29:09
CPU because they were both running the game incredibly well even at ultra
29:12
details whereas in games like Crisis 3 I was seeing as much as a 40% delta
29:18
between the 970 and the 970M
29:21
yeah there there's going to be those and and and I think you know if you look at
29:25
just the specs the the the the 980M has
29:29
fewer shaders than the 970 desktop part
29:33
does yep right and the memory clock runs significantly lower 5 GHz instead of 7
29:38
GHz uh so there there's fundamentally
29:41
there is going to be a difference there so I think the the closest analog to the
29:44
980M is probably the 970 desktop and
29:48
it's kind of between the 680 well we'll
29:51
say the 770 and the 970 is kind of where
29:54
performance sits there all right so let's talk about the new Unreal Engine
29:59
bringing eerily realistic skin to your games does eerily realistic skin even
30:04
sound like something we want no not me personally ethnod posts this on the
30:09
forum thanks for that and uh the original article is either from ngadget
30:13
or unrealengine.com if you prefer to get it straight from the horse's mouth and
30:18
um basically Ryan do you want to explain what subsurface scattering is exactly
30:23
and how that makes things like skin or
30:26
candles or especially any objects that are slightly translucent look more
30:30
realistic in games so I mean subsurface scattering is not I I I don't think it's
30:35
a graphics rendering specific term but the idea is pretty simple where you have
30:39
a semi-t translansucent layer in this
30:43
case your skin right and the light will penetrate one or more layers of the skin
30:48
and then bounce out in a different way right so you may have some portion of
30:54
that light going hitting your skin and bouncing back you may have some portion
30:57
of the light going a couple of layers deep and bouncing out and the result is
31:01
a different um kind of shade or look or
31:04
style to how skin actually looks and it's something that you know we're used
31:08
to seeing every day when you when when we're sitting here recording a video and
31:12
you just look at yourself on the camera and you see a little bit of sheen on that part of your forehead there that
31:17
you you know that that is something that is very hard to render accurately and do
31:22
it in a fast you know real time method
31:25
so uh Unreal Engine what is it the 4.5
31:28
update 4.5 yeah yeah i mean these guys
31:32
they just do everything awesome right like the the tech they build is
31:36
impressive as hell um so a subsurface
31:40
scattering basically i'm trying to think the first time I remember hearing that
31:43
uh like some of the uh what was the the
31:47
NVIDIA elf pixie character's name u Oh
31:50
shoot it wasn't Dawn was it yeah I think it was Dawn yeah I think you're right
31:54
and that was like they were like showing off subsurface scattering for the very
31:58
first time but now you think about it how long has it been since we saw that
32:02
demo and now we're finally getting it into an engine that can operate that
32:06
technology in a real-time manner it's been six or seven years hasn't it yeah
32:09
there's I mean there are several iterations of Dawn so I can't tell you exactly which one Yeah had that demo to
32:15
begin with but yeah i mean the funny thing about it is it puts us sort of
32:19
tech you know podcasters or journalists or whoever else puts us in a really
32:23
weird position because NVIDIA and AMD for that matter are both always
32:28
trumpeting about this stuff whether it's uh VXGi or whether it's um you know
32:33
physics simulations interfacing with each other in real time or whatever the
32:39
newest coolest thing they're showing us is where we kind of sit there and we go
32:43
well [ __ ] guys it's going to be eight
32:47
years before you can actually do any of
32:50
this in real time in a game engine because you look at something like that
32:53
lunar okay here before I talk about the lunar lander guys in the corner here on
32:58
the left you've got no subsurface scattering so his face looks kind of too
33:03
harsh in the middle you've got a little bit of subsurface scattering so the
33:06
reflections off of his face and the the tone of his skin looks a lot more
33:10
natural and then on the very far right you've got an exaggerated effect where
33:14
they've cranked it up too much kind of like oversaturating your TV and it just
33:18
his face looks like it's made of melted wax so I just wanted to show you that to
33:21
you guys so a great example of this would be NVIDIA's Lunar Lander demo
33:27
where they've got their VXGI realtime global illumination running and on two
33:33
GTX 980s with a static scene that is not
33:38
moving and with what what is it two
33:42
models of people where we're and we don't even have anything that's
33:46
complicated to render they're in suits they're They're not even They don't even
33:49
have skin or anything and then we've got a ship that's mostly hard edges and that
33:55
thing's still chugged just moving the camera around a little bit i mean how
33:59
far are we away from a having any hardware that can run this reasonably
34:03
well and b a game dev actually implementing this technology it makes it
34:07
tough to talk about this stuff when it's actually like futuristic tech not really
34:13
that meaningful for the GTX 980 no game will ever run on the GTX 980 that uses
34:18
that technology it's it's been that way really since I
34:22
have ever covered graphics cards right from the very first time we saw TNL
34:26
lighting and and and then you know programmable shaders and geometry
34:30
shaders and all this stuff they always had these amazing demos you never really knew what the implementation timeline
34:35
was and right you know part of that comes back to
34:39
people that have this distaste for something like GameWorks NVIDIA's goal
34:43
with that is to get that tech into games as quickly as possible now it means they
34:47
sacrifice compatibility and kind of broad industry support for prop for
34:52
proprietary stuff but you know like they
34:55
say that VxGI is in the current iteration of the Unreal Engine but when
35:02
will you actually see it in a game is still up in the air and then to what
35:06
degree right there's a whole lot of resolution options for VxGI and I mean
35:11
the thing about that is to what degree is really going to depend on the
35:14
adoption of cards that support it and if we've got two cards each of which cost
35:19
more than $300 then we're a long way away from
35:23
from any game dev actually investing the time and resources that it would take i
35:27
mean I mean you look at game devs not even not even porting their existing
35:31
games to DirectX12 or not even taking games that are currently in development
35:35
and bothering to move them to DirectX12 or Mantle or whatever the case may be
35:39
where you're going to have an enormous market a built-in user base for these
35:45
technologies and then you take something like VXGI where it's limited to one or
35:49
two cards i mean come on i mean having it in a game engine like UE4 will help
35:54
with that and it needs to be one of those things that you can enable disable
35:57
it doesn't affect uh your game play per
36:00
se but more about visual style um I
36:04
don't know it I we want to see that kind of stuff in there and so I I applaud any
36:09
company whether it be a hardware vendor or software vendor that is willing to
36:12
stick their neck out and do more work uh
36:16
to push the technology forward right if we only stuck with things that worked on
36:20
GPUs today we would never actually develop the tech that would allow us to
36:24
do even newer better cooler things on
36:27
GPUs next year right so somebody's got to start at hardware or software um it
36:33
used to be at software that pushed it right and now it's kind of the hardware
36:36
developers saying "Hey guys try this hey guys try this." Speaking of hardware
36:41
developers this topic isn't actually in the document but AMD reached out to me
36:46
i've got a pager email from uh from Robert over there in my inbox saying
36:51
that they watched the October 4th WAN Show yay people watch my show um and
36:56
wanted to address some points I made about Freync uh okay you acknowledge at
37:02
2551 that G-Sync monitors are extremely expensive we are hoping that Freync will
37:07
help with this you say there is misinformation concerning Freync but AMD
37:12
does offer a comprehensive FAQ so uh
37:16
they had just asked me to go ahead and show you guys the AMD FAQ that exists
37:21
about Project Freync so it's
37:28
support.AMD.com-uskb-article/pages/freync-faq.aspx really easy to remember guys just go ahead key that into your browser right
37:32
now
37:35
um but the main thing that I wanted to clarify is that I wasn't saying that the
37:41
misinformation that's there right now is coming from AMD AMD has their FAQ and
37:47
that's fine and that's great what I was saying is that there's a lot of
37:50
misinformation out there and I think that it's a lot of people repeating
37:55
things that they heard earlier on in the Freync development process back when we
38:01
really didn't know what the heck was going on and AMD wasn't communicating as
38:05
clearly as they are right now so Ryan
38:08
you're pretty familiar with Freync correct uh as familiar as I can be yeah
38:13
yeah well given that we don't have products in our hands yet right but I
38:17
mean can you can you explain what the heck it is exactly and how it relates to
38:22
G-Sync so um the the initial So the way
38:27
I understand it now Freync is a is a
38:31
name I don't know if it'll be the final name a brand associated with the
38:34
implementation with AMD's specific implementation of the Visa DisplayPort
38:41
1.2A to a adaptive sync technology so
38:44
adaptive sync was adopted by uh the the visa foundation into DisplayPort 1.2A
38:49
revision 2 or whatever they call it um as an optional part of the specification
38:56
and all it does is it gives the uh hardware and software vendors the
39:00
ability to understand that there is a potential for the ability to withhold a
39:05
um a vblank signal right so you basically can control a monitor's
39:10
refresh cycle through a system through
39:14
an external system like a PC now that
39:17
doesn't give you the that sync or that the adaptive sync standard doesn't give
39:21
you any information about uh how you handle special cases how you actually
39:25
implement it how it works with your driver how it works with Windows and all
39:28
that other stuff so right the free sync technology as they're calling it is kind
39:33
of AMD's implementation of adaptosync into a product so that's one of the
39:38
biggest misconceptions out there you guys freync is not built into display
39:44
port it's not just a matter of any DisplayPort 1.2A display and any AMD
39:52
GPU that supports Freync you plug them together and magic's going to happen in
39:57
much the same way that NVIDIA's G-Sync relies on the hardware being implemented
40:02
on the monitor in a specific way we will have that same process going
40:07
on with Freync it will have to actually be a Freync certified display now AMD is
40:11
saying that they're not planning to charge a licensing fee for it though correct
40:16
well correct because the the display
40:20
port so the only technology required by
40:23
the display uh scaler vendor is adaptive
40:26
sync right so that is already part of the standard so AMD you know doesn't
40:32
really control so a monitor will come out that will support adaptive sync it
40:37
doesn't necessarily support freync it will be on freync the AMD technology to
40:41
support adaptive sync monitors right so
40:44
but as it turns out because uh uh Tom was on our show and talked very openly
40:49
about the fact that NVIDIA is not going to support adaptive sync monitors you
40:53
will essentially have freync versus G-Sync as opposed to what many had hoped
40:58
which is you would have G-Sync and then this other standard that both vendors
41:02
would support um which and would eventually just be ubiquitous right
41:06
which is not going to be the case anymore so it's disappointing i know and I
41:11
expressed that to him several times uh but you know Freync has the capability
41:16
it has the opportunity to be everything that we love about G-Sync and cheaper it
41:22
has that opportunity um the it will it
41:26
will what they need to do is prove it right NVIDIA's claim has always been
41:31
that hey it's not easy to do if it were super easy to do everybody would have
41:34
done it by now and AMD's stance is that
41:38
we can do it it's pretty easy and we can make it you know we're not going to
41:41
charge kind of the licensing fee and we're not going to charge the markup
41:44
that you see on all the G-Sync monitors out there which is a amicable goal like
41:47
I'm totally for that give us variable refresh displays cheaper than we get
41:51
them today yeah I'm I'm all for it i
41:54
just I have to wonder if they're going to pull it off because they they they do
41:58
they did say that they uh they linked me to uh to
42:04
anchor at Computex um so so that's cool
42:08
but Scott had uh we had Scott Wson on last week um so Scott had expressed some
42:14
some I guess some respect for how
42:18
complicated G-Sync was and he had said that that Tom had told him that they
42:24
actually it was a good thing that they used a programmable chip for the G-Sync
42:27
module because otherwise they would have been doing a hardware refresh that's why
42:31
it took so long from when they showed it to us back in October last year to when
42:35
we actually got monitors because it wasn't working they had to they had to
42:39
actually redesign the functionality of the chip and reprogram it yeah yeah i
42:43
mean it the Yes this the same thing is
42:46
what I've been told as well that it that it's incredibly complicated i mean don't
42:50
I mean clearly you and I were both at that event in Montreal NVIDIA was
42:54
incredibly excited about the the tech they would not have waited until August
42:59
to release a display if there was any re any way they could have not waited till
43:03
August to release a display right yeah and I mean NVIDIA is usually pretty tidy
43:09
as far as announce seed samples get it out the
43:14
door yeah like they're they're textbook execution you know them and guys like
43:18
Apple they they just they do it they nail it um and for NVIDIA to announce
43:24
something and show it and promise it was going to be available on a date you're
43:28
usually pretty sure that they're pretty damn sure it's coming and they were way
43:32
late on it yeah and I I think it's I think I don't know this for a fact but I
43:36
think one of the reasons why NVIDIA will not support adaptive sync displays is
43:42
because to support an adaptive sync display your driver basically has to do
43:47
all of the work in Windows that the
43:50
combination of driver and controller that NVIDIA has on G-Sync will do now
43:55
and if they do that basically they will have to put all of the knowledge that
43:58
they have learned over the last couple of years building G-Sync into their software which will then make it easily
44:03
discoverable by AMD right and so that
44:06
they would get a jump start in that way but um you know like like I said I want
44:11
Freync to be here already uh you know
44:14
we've we've had we've had Richard Huddy and and those guys on our show and
44:17
they've they've promised prototypes at certain times and don't really have them
44:21
yet i was promised one by in September uh and we It's as far as I know it's the
44:27
middle of October now uh well let's be fair it's the 10th of October which is
44:31
the 3rd of October it's It's the first
44:34
3rd of October we We'll go with that uh
44:38
yeah october has 31 days so until we're
44:41
actually No if we're a third of the way through today then No no it is the second third of October but not half
44:46
let's just agree that it's not half okay we got to be If we're going to we're going to make these these these claims
44:50
out here we want to make sure we're accurate so you know I I want it to be
44:54
there and I I think what will I think what will inevitably happen is we'll
44:57
we'll have to wait until CES i think scaler vendors it's not a super quick
45:01
process you know when we first heard about Freync they were talking about oh you'd be able to upgrade some displays
45:05
and that's clearly not going to happen right as it turns out flashing a
45:10
firmware is not going to make a monitor a good experience you can make it
45:13
variable refresh all you want but it will be a good experience right uh and
45:18
and when light is involved in hitting your
45:21
eyes any any degradation in that will be
45:25
noticeable easily so which worries me a lot i mean here's something how cuz Okay
45:31
it's it's well it's not that easy okay so
45:35
let's go back to the old days when it was pretty easy to figure out which
45:39
graphics card delivered the best gaming experience you know you fired up a game
45:43
you recorded your average FPS and you made a bar graph and that was the whole
45:47
story y then all of a sudden we're dealing with runt frames frames that are
45:52
displayed for such a short period of time on your screen that you you
45:56
actually don't even perceive them we're dealing with things like stutters that
45:59
don't actually show up in an average or even necessarily a minimum frame rate
46:05
but that are visually very obvious we actually illustrated this in our
46:09
four-way SLI scaling video very recently
46:12
where we intentionally froze the frame of our video very periodically lowering
46:18
our overall Oh you saw that oh okay yeah
46:22
so we were So for the viewers then we were trying to make a point that just
46:25
because you lower your frame rate 1% or two or 3% doesn't mean that it's only 3%
46:31
less visually smooth you can see a stutter very clearly so that's why and
46:36
this was the first time we ever had you as a guest on the show that's why FCAT
46:40
or actually capturing the output of the graphics card analyzing every frame to
46:44
look at what the viewer was actually seeing became very important but for
46:49
something like G-Sync versus Freync how the hell are we going to qualify or
46:53
excuse me quantify the smoothness of the
46:57
experience so uh it will involve uh basic it's
47:02
basically the same process we use now for capture but with cameras right and
47:06
actually we we have a we we kind of have the ability right now to capture
47:11
variable variable refresh video um
47:15
through DisplayPort it's it's it's like working through some of these ASIC
47:19
manufacturers and it's not working very well and it's the post-processing side
47:24
of it is actually much more difficult post-processing with a static 60 hertz
47:28
video is really easy you know what to account for and what to look for when it
47:31
varies all the time you you really don't know what you're looking for to even
47:35
measure against it right so right uh it's going to take a little bit of I
47:39
think software on the the tested PC side
47:43
to output some here's what I tried to send result right and then a
47:47
post-processing algorithm that says well here's what I actually saw and then we
47:50
get into the issue of are in is NVIDIA
47:55
going to play well with that is AMD going to play well with that are they going to fix that system in some way
48:00
it's going to be really complicated and I think at least initially it's going to
48:03
be a lot of well I have these two monitors sitting next to me and they're
48:07
identical systems you know one's got a 290X and one's got a 980 and I'm playing
48:11
the same game and maybe I have a mouse going into a an HID distributor so that
48:16
you can play the same game with one mouse and try to like see the
48:20
comparisons there's going to be a lot of that crap where it's very objective and
48:24
because it's objective everybody's wrong right if I say better yeah yeah sorry
48:29
because it's subjective everybody's going to be wrong because everybody will
48:33
have a different opinion so basically the hardware review industry of which
48:37
you've been a part for 15 years is going
48:40
full circle from like yeah dude I got
48:43
this graphics card it gets like great FPS and my games run super smooth to
48:47
getting it really down to a science to where we could really figure out which
48:51
one was better and then we're going all the way back to yeah dude I got these
48:54
two graphics cards I'm going to play with them both side by side I'll let you know which one's better yeah I I think
49:00
it will be like that initially and that sucks but uh that's terrible we'll fix
49:04
it we'll we'll figure it out like it it will be an industry problem that will be
49:07
solved because there's too much money and too much pride in both of these
49:11
companies to kind of just let it let it sit there and be determined by our uh uh
49:18
subjective eyeballs I guess by staring at it really hard yeah and no nothing
49:23
good happens once you've stared at a monitor for three hours straight trying to figure out which one is better
49:27
nothing good will happen so uh it needs to be something yeah i had someone tweet
49:32
at me the other day about how easy my job is and uh I was kind of I was
49:37
sitting there last night at 4 in the morning uh benchmarking these new mobile
49:42
graphics cards just kind of going "Dude you have no idea." My wife to this day
49:47
still believes that I sit at the office and play video games all day and I'm
49:51
like "Ah who am benchmarking them hun?" when when
49:55
you play the same 60 to 90 second portion of uh Skyrim for the I think
50:02
40,000th time uh it's not really fun
50:05
anymore you know some benchmarks are okay i don't mind our Tomb Raider run
50:10
cuz it's got some it's got some cinematic bits where you kind of you
50:13
kind of watch some stuff at the beginning then it's got like a slow-mo thing where you like pop two guys then
50:18
you go into a burning building you jump across a chasm you like uh silent kill
50:23
some guy you jump up and then you kill more two more guys like it's actually a
50:27
pretty engaging benchmark but our Shadow
50:30
of Mordor benchmark when I was running that last night Tomb Raider the 2
50:34
minutes flies by shadow of Mordor the
50:38
only way we got it um consistent enough
50:41
cuz we'll do we'll do five or 10 runs once we've locked it down and we'll be
50:45
looking for about 2 to 5 FPS difference
50:48
on the same hardware in order to decide okay this runs okay for our error
50:53
tolerance so Shadow of Mordor the way we got that done because it's got dynamic
50:58
weather it's got dynamic you know roving
51:01
locations yeah yep bad dudes and all this stuff it was really hard so we
51:06
ended up finding an instance that always has the same weather and then always has
51:11
the same baddies that will mostly come and attack you all at the same time in
51:15
pretty much the same way and they'll circle you so the way the benchmark
51:18
works in order to make it equally visually demanding is we attract all the
51:23
baddies and then block for two minutes
51:26
with some nice scenery in the background so we keep we keep our character
51:31
stationary and our camera as stationary as possible and block for two minutes
51:34
and that's how we got the consistency i swear I sometimes I would miss a block
51:38
because I was half asleep half asleep at the wheel there yeah that's I could see
51:44
how that would be pretty bad yeah you know at three in the morning it's like
51:48
oh I have to block this orc again crap
51:52
just get like a What remember when they had the the the controllers with the turbo buttons where you just hold it
51:56
down maybe you could do that no because I have to reposition him i
52:01
actually have to be paying close attention to the block so I keep him in
52:05
the same location so I'm rendering basically the same scene yeah all right
52:08
that's pretty bad yeah and the funny the stupid thing about Shadow of Mordor is
52:13
and I'm sure you're with me on this how much do you wish that video game makers
52:17
would build in benchmarks into their games shadow of Mordor does have a
52:22
benchmark in it it does but here's a problem shadow of Mordor is capped at
52:26
100 FPS and the benchmark runs at whatever frame rate it wants so you
52:31
could get a max FPS value of 280 frames per second because I think it's actually
52:36
recording when the screen is black and the game will never run that way so
52:40
you're not getting a meaningful result yep yep you're right i I didn't see that
52:44
issue because we we were using the capture stuff so we didn't capture the
52:48
the black screen stuff so yeah okay i see what you're saying yep good point
52:52
that and from what I've seen the Shadow of Mordor benchmark is really not that
52:57
representative of in-game performance anyway because you don't get that close
53:00
to any of the models and you don't really have a ton of them on screen at a
53:03
time so when we do our blocking combat
53:07
thing we actually get 10 to 20% lower
53:10
than that fly through which has fires and all the things that should be
53:13
demanding and then when you have adverse weather conditions you actually drop
53:18
another 20% off the performance so that in-game benchmark which is always great
53:22
weather and never gets too close to anything is about 30 to 40% out of the
53:27
performance that people could actually expect to get in the game i think it does rain in the benchmark but it's not
53:31
the most demanding instance of rain in the game when the weather's really heavy
53:36
it it tanks it yep so that was really frustrating for me because I kind of
53:40
went well shoot this isn't that usable actually yep yeah i think what would be
53:46
better is Well I mean in that in your instance there it's all dynamic so being
53:50
able to record and replay USB input wouldn't really help you in that
53:53
instance no no it wouldn't unfortunately
53:57
tough life we have sorry yeah I know playing video games for a living
54:02
or so everyone thinks that's what they think it's all right so here's an
54:06
interesting little piece of news now we all know the iPhone 6 which by the way I
54:10
have finally received one of for those of you who were expecting me to do a
54:14
review here's my uh here's my iPhone 6 that I have obviously totally set up see
54:20
got completely all the stock icons and nothing else on it so I'm not I'm not
54:24
started yet um finally got my iPhone 6 i
54:28
live dangerously got it in my back pocket
54:32
i'm I'm like a I'm like a a badass over here um so we originally thought there
54:38
was a viral video that Marcus Brownley released where he was showing off the
54:42
sapphire glass that was supposedly going to be on the new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6
54:46
Plus we originally thought we were going to get a sapphire glass complete display
54:49
cover turns out we didn't get that at all and GT Advanced Technologies Apple's
54:54
Sapphire Glass supplier has just filed for bankruptcy um so this was posted by
54:59
Querty Warrior on the forum the original article was from Next Powerup and
55:04
basically last year they entered into a big deal uh over $500 million with Apple
55:09
to supply Sapphire Glass they're meant to start actually supplying it in 2015
55:14
and they are now down to 85 million in cash and looking for additional
55:18
financing to continue their operations so Ryan how much of a blow is this to
55:23
the adoption of Sapphire Glass because we all know that Apple really leads the
55:28
charge on materials technology in a way that no one else seems to be willing to
55:32
do the the the issue with Apple is they like to own the materials that they use
55:38
or at least kind of be the almost exclusive buyer from those companies
55:42
right so you know I'm interested so like the the the phone doesn't use sapphire
55:46
but the watch uses sapphire yes right so
55:49
is this indication that they don't expect the the watch to sell as much as
55:55
maybe they had originally or you know are you believe that they were going to
55:59
build the display out of Sapphire and change their mind kind of at the last
56:03
minute i guess on the on the phones I do
56:06
wonder yeah I mean it that seems likely right you have a company who has this
56:11
multi-million deal multi-million deal
56:14
dollar deal with multiple years through Apple and it kind of like all falls
56:18
through um you know clearly they were doing some experimenting and it didn't
56:22
turn out but yeah and I mean someone the size of Corning I think even an Apple PO
56:27
probably doesn't scare them that much so if Apple turns around and goes "Okay
56:30
yeah we need one bazillion orders of Gorilla Glass 3." I think Corning can
56:35
probably turn that around for them okay um so it that really is what it looks
56:40
like um those samples that were floating around may have very well been samples
56:44
that no deal ever got done on and how how disappointing is it then to see that
56:49
sapphire glass is still probably not going to be the standard for a while i
56:54
you know I I I go through a lot of phones i don't really scratch them very
56:59
often and I don't them usually i kind of
57:02
I do sometimes but uh I never I was
57:06
never really sure that it made sense based on the cost difference to have a
57:10
sapphire screen on a phone for my watch it makes total sense because I slam that
57:15
into every wall and door frame and yeah
57:18
and everything right like it gets beat up i have a Samsung Gear Live and I
57:22
don't think it has a sapphire screen and I think you can tell that that is the
57:26
case right so my Pebble Steel is still doing okay is does that one have a
57:30
Gorilla Glass screen at least i don't know actually i'm not It's actually I
57:34
will admit looking at it now in these lights that there aren't really any
57:37
major scratches which is maybe impressive maybe it does have something
57:41
in there good but I mean even if it has like Gorilla Glass 3 that's still a
57:46
pretty good product for scratch resistance so um it just you know it
57:49
makes more sense it's hard to manufacture sapphire is uh it's easier
57:54
to much much easier to manufacture in a small form factor like this than it is
57:58
in a 5.5 in you know iPhone 6 Plus type
58:02
form factor so right I think we'll get there eventually right like they'll
58:07
somebody will have some manufacturing um breakthrough and cost will go down
58:12
and it's just like anything else that you produce or manufacture there
58:15
somebody will eventually figure it out if there is a need for it um I guess it
58:19
just wasn't GT Advanced Technologies this time it was not or maybe it was
58:24
them and they have the best solution possible and Apple was like no we don't
58:27
want to cut into our uh you know our our markup our margins that much so we're
58:33
going to wait for our next generation so maybe the 6S will have sapphire or maybe
58:38
not you know so who knows with Apple yeah that's true speaking of the Gear
58:42
Live how do you how do you find the smartwatch experience without a
58:46
multi-day battery because I've I've stuck by the Pebble Steel especially at
58:51
that new $200 price point And with that new third party app that's giving you
58:55
continuous I think it does continuous fitness monitoring not possibly to the
59:00
same extent that some other stuff can do with heart rate and all that but I
59:04
freaking love this thing and I love that even as a very heavy user I can go four
59:09
days without charging it are you okay with one day um I I would like to not be
59:16
but I think I am you know I guess my general rule is I'm going to charge my
59:20
phone anyway so plugging in the watch
59:24
right next to it doesn't really make it that big of a deal um there have been
59:28
several instances where I've like taken off my watch on my dresser instead of my
59:33
nightstand where my chargers are and forgot about it and woke up the next
59:36
morning and had a dead watch and got well that's stupid uh and wished that it
59:42
had had longer battery life but I wish that for my phones every day as well
59:46
right so but does does better wireless charging address all of this in the next
59:51
six to 18 months anyway depends on what what it is like so wireless charging
59:57
would help right because the main problem with with the Galaxy Gear Live
60:00
at least is that it doesn't have a standard USB port for charging yeah it
60:03
has that stupid cradle right it's got the cradle and it has the cradle because of the water resistant necessary like
60:09
you know you don't want to ruin your watch when you wash your hands yeah so
60:13
uh you know not h only having that one charger means I don't have one at the
60:16
office I don't have one in my car and I don't have one at the house all at the
60:19
same time um scrub yeah exactly yeah i
60:24
don't know if you can buy them extra but I'm sure you can uh but I forgot the
60:28
question now is is a day of battery life
60:32
okay it's okay like it sucks but I would like my phone to go longer as well but
60:37
we all made this sacrifice when I had a Blackberry i could go awesome i could go
60:43
three days yeah on a phone right my old Nokia brick yeah i could I decided to
60:49
sacrifice um features and functionality
60:52
for battery life and now as as people in this office would be able to attend to
60:56
uh I I am desperately looking to go the other direction without sacrificing
61:01
features like I have a GS4 now the battery is getting old uh it's it's
61:05
starting to to lower its battery life i would love to have a phone with the same
61:08
level of performance and feature set that has like two days of battery life
61:12
don't give me a phone that has new stuff i don't necessarily want the new stuff
61:16
right i want a phone that's going to last me and if I get drunk and pass out
61:20
at a friend's house I don't wake up with a dead phone all the time not that I do
61:23
that all the time just you know just in case question for you and you know what
61:27
we we've got to do a we've got to do a straw poll on this let me just uh let me
61:32
just get a get a straw poll going here do you think that anyone will have the
61:38
balls to do a 2-day or a 3-day battery
61:42
phone and sacrifice the thinness and
61:46
sexiness that we've come to expect i was I was really hoping Apple would do it
61:50
because Apple's been such a pioneer when it comes to battery life i was really
61:55
hoping that the 6 series would maintain
61:58
the same thickness as the older phones compromise on weight a little bit
62:03
add a little bit of weight and put a similar size battery to what a flagship
62:07
Android phone is doing so maybe where the 6 Plus would have had a a 3,200
62:11
milliamp battery like something like an Xperia Z2 does where Apple with the way
62:17
that they sip battery especially when idle or with tasks running in the
62:20
background compared to Android would have legitimately been able to deliver a
62:25
a multi-day at least a two-day battery do you think anyone's going to have the
62:29
balls or are we going to have to wait for Project Aura and for people to just
62:33
build it themselves out of modular components i I I I want to believe that
62:38
somebody would have the guts to do that
62:41
because it's not really that I mean as many Android phones as there are out
62:45
there as many options as HTC makes or uh
62:50
Samsung makes like take the Galaxy S5
62:54
and call it you know the Galaxy S5
62:57
business edition or something like that right and you make it a half inch
63:02
instead of whatever else right you maybe make it a quarter inch thicker and you
63:05
give it like a 4500 milliamp hour battery or something like that right uh
63:10
I would buy that phone because I have
63:13
normalized pockets i'm not you know I don't have an issue with uh uh the size
63:18
of phones and I don't carry a purse or anything but I'm okay i would much
63:22
rather sacrifice that um you look at the the super thin iPhone 6 and 6 Plus and
63:27
they're beautiful looking designs they really are beautiful but if add two
63:33
millimeters to it three millimeters to it four millimeters to it how much do you extend that battery life i'd love to
63:38
see some kind of math on that and I'm sure you could do it without too much
63:42
work right how if you add 4 mil of battery to that device what does that
63:47
equate to in milliamp hours and then what does that equate to in actual real
63:50
world usage um and the thing is how many people have MPHI right people buy MPHI
63:55
all the time and it makes your phone a brick they do it for battery life purposes
64:00
exactly and I mean the thing is that you know these these companies a lot of the
64:04
time I feel like guys like Samsung in particular they just kind of throw
64:09
things at the wall and and hope that they stick and they don't really even
64:12
seem to know what they're doing a lot of the time where they just release a dozen
64:16
galaxies and then one of them will have sensient life in it you know what I mean
64:21
and it seems like we're giving it to
64:25
them this time we're handing them the solution consumers are demanding this
64:29
and with the way that charging technology has improved over the last
64:32
few generations where you can charge high-capacity batteries much more
64:37
quickly are we are they just not doing it because it adds so much to the bomb
64:41
cost of the phone like is that the issue we're seeing here um probably some of
64:46
that is right batteries aren't necessarily cheap um and it's uh you
64:51
know depending on how many you're going to make it it's an upfront expense right
64:55
and if it's a huge flop you have to eat that cost um I was one of the people
65:00
that when I had a Palm Prix way back in the day like I bought You're so young
65:05
and hip i know i bought like the the
65:09
giant uh I forget who made that battery the off-brand CDIO
65:14
sure never heard of it off brandand battery ext it was like a a big battery
65:18
and it had a different back on it that was way fatter than everything else and
65:21
I thought "This is dumb looking but man I can go two and a half days uh without
65:25
having to recharge the phone." So this types of things still exist i'm trying
65:29
to think was the last phone I did that on uh the Nexus uh 5 no no Nexus 4
65:35
Google Nexus one of those i bought like a an extra-large battery that had to
65:39
have a different back case to it um that
65:42
made it look dumb because it was very obviously not what it shipped with uh
65:46
but it was a much more usable device because of it you know at least okay I'm
65:50
going to I'm going to end this topic on on with an anecdote here at least it's
65:54
not as bad as the really old days did you ever have a pocket PC uh I did yes
66:00
okay did you ever have one of the pocket PCs that actually didn't have persistent
66:05
storage i don't think I did have one of those i
66:10
had an HP pack that actually the the
66:14
onboard storage not the RAM I'm talking storage the onboard storage did not
66:19
retain data if the device fully discharged and so it actually it
66:25
actually had two um it actually had two battery meters on it there was like the
66:30
usable battery meter and then there was the reserve auxiliary battery meter so
66:34
once you ran out of battery it would the device would power off just like it was
66:39
off but then it had a reserve there that would last for about 5 days I think or
66:43
something like that and if you you lost all of that you had to plug it in and
66:48
charge it and it was factory reset wow i
66:51
did have an iPad i don't know if I ever had one that did that but I would have I
66:55
don't remember that ever happening so I don't know that's weird yeah it was it
66:59
was super super stupid um speaking of super super stupid
67:05
I'm going to do our sponsor segments here so what's not stupid is linda.com
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at Linus Media Group who use the skills they learned with linda.com daily at
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their jobs so it really does work it's really awesome it's one of the actually
68:26
it's one of the sponsors that I get the most uh testimonials about people
68:31
tweeting at me hey I'm on linda.com thanks for the recommendation it's
68:34
awesome so there you go now this one Phantom Glass I don't get nearly as many
68:40
people telling me that they have it and it's amazing um so my guess is that you
68:45
guys haven't tried it yet because it really is awesome i've got phantom glass
68:49
on my 1m8 you would never know it from touching it i was actually showing this
68:53
to someone um where was I it was it was
68:57
at one of the factory tours yeah it was at Sennheiser we were talking about
69:00
using highquality materials in in
69:03
hardware and uh for some reason yes we
69:06
were talking about some device that had a touch sensitive glass thing glass
69:12
panel on it that was in the room where we were getting our presentation and I
69:16
forget how we got on the topic but they were talking about how screen protectors
69:19
or really anything but Gorilla Glass or similar high-grade glass coatings really
69:24
feels awful when you're using it and uh
69:28
so I pulled up my phone and I went "Well I bet you don't know that I actually
69:31
have a screen protector on here that's uh that's made of Gorilla Glass." So the
69:35
way that it works and we did a review video of it that ended up being the
69:39
springboard for the sponsorship relationship because I loved the product
69:43
so much that we decided to reach out to them and go "Well hey should we work
69:46
together?" Because I'm totally willing to endorse this stuff it's freaking
69:50
awesome it's got a nano coating on the backside that's actually removable and
69:55
can be reapplied if for whatever reason you wanted to do that but it never comes
69:59
up on its own it's actually quite hard to take off the only reason I took it
70:02
off once was cuz when I was putting it on in the first place I put it on in the
70:05
wrong spot and I was like "Oh crap there's no way I'm going to be able to take it off put it back on it's actually
70:09
going to work." It did and then the front of it has the same olophobic
70:14
scratchresistant properties as Gorilla Glass 3 because that's exactly what it's
70:18
made of the only thing you give up is that there is going to be a slight ridge
70:22
around the edges of the screen but it's thin enough at least that you can use it
70:26
with most cases in fact I think they advertise all cases but I I hate to say
70:30
that cuz I'm sure someone somewhere will find a case that it doesn't work with
70:34
but it'll work with most aftermarket cases without any gaps or any sort of
70:39
any sort of weirdness so guys check it out
70:42
store.fantom.glass they're actually uh they're going to be sponsoring us at CES
70:46
this year and uh we're going to be doing either I'm not quite sure which it'll be
70:50
yet but we're either going to do a dedicated video where Luke and I run
70:54
around just going into booths and rubbing our phones on crap and getting
70:58
people's reactions uh or we're going to do uh we're just going to do that
71:03
randomly during interviews with people and just kind of cut that together into
71:07
a funny montage because it's that
71:10
protective not only is it very scratch resistant but you can actually replace
71:14
it and your screen underneath will be perfect of course still just like any
71:18
other screen protector except that it doesn't look like ass and feel like ass
71:21
because you know if it looks like ass and feels like ass it's probably
71:25
ass that whole that duck saying looks
71:28
like a duck and quacks like a duck anyway the point is I think we should move on to our next topic here thanks to
71:32
our sponsors linda.com and Phantom Glass
71:35
and will you will you promise to wear a costume when you do that video i
71:40
probably should what what would be like a like like a like a ghost costume like
71:44
phantom glass
71:50
sure maybe Pac-Man ghost you know there you go maybe maybe something more
71:54
comical i don't think people mostly cosplay at CES but we could start that
71:58
trend you could try you could try
72:03
yeah would you do it if we did it would you cosplay CES all your meetings and
72:08
all your show floor visits probably wouldn't i pro probably would not all my
72:14
meetings i don't know maybe once or twice but maybe not all of them i go to
72:19
all the parties with you dressed up like that how's that speaking of Glass Fnod
72:23
posted this on the forum the original article is from Digital Trends i'm just
72:26
going to go ahead and screen share here google Glass can now add closed captions
72:32
to real life absolutely fascinating technology i mean I think we all saw
72:37
stuff like this coming it's just augmented reality that's all it really
72:41
is but the fact that we're getting there
72:44
with this frankly very rudimentary
72:48
hardware that we have now is extremely exciting so the idea is that you would
72:53
be able to um maybe not necessarily
72:56
transcribe an entire conversation perfectly for someone who is let's say
73:01
completely completely deaf has no hearing in either ears but if you've got
73:05
someone who's hard of hearing and misses a word here and there or even in some
73:08
cases people who speak different languages you would be able to
73:12
communicate with each other that's really the killer feature for this right
73:16
is going out of the country i I go to
73:20
China i don't speak Mandarin uh you know I can have a conversation with somebody
73:24
if we are both wearing these devices um
73:28
it requires it's going to require more processing than we have today and it's
73:31
you know needs to be perfected to a certain degree but and roaming needs to
73:34
go away because uh you're not going to be using a feature like this without your internet connection that's true
73:39
that's true um well it's got a long way to go yet but it does um I would also
73:45
they had something when I I had Glass initially and and used it for a little
73:49
while and it had the ability to translate um signs right there was an
73:54
app that could do that right where the idea was road signs or street signs you
73:59
know that gave mileage or or directions or street names or something like that
74:02
in a different language would be translated for you and it worked okay
74:06
but it was something like where you need you needed to be very still and you had to point the camera at a very specific
74:10
way and uh uh this this seems to be like
74:13
to be a more useful implementation of
74:16
that idea right because I mean Google if
74:20
anybody has uh voiceto text transcription down it should be Google
74:25
right all the Google voicemails they do all the close captioning they do on
74:29
YouTube videos uh and all the corrections that they do for that stuff
74:34
they should be pretty good at that you would think that i actually had a pretty
74:37
stupid experience with uh with uh Google Now earlier today i think I asked for
74:42
directions somewhere and it Googled directions to wherever like it still
74:46
does that for me about 40% of the time i hate Google Now really infuriating it's
74:51
It's way better than what Siri does we have this debate in our office all the
74:55
time no no no no yeah it is i'm sure the
74:58
audience doesn't want me to to do the whole Siri versus Google Now thing again
75:03
but I Why don't we just say this i disagree with you and we'll have this
75:07
debate next time you're on the show okay okay all right fair enough all right
75:11
i'll I'll bring my best Google Now phone and we'll have a a a speech off we'll
75:16
have a speech off that what I would actually be interested in that we'll see
75:20
if we can stump each other's phones yeah that'd be good that might be kind of fun
75:25
all right speaking of things that are fun uh customer information compromised
75:29
in an AT&T insider breach this was
75:32
originally posted by Dietrich W on the forum and the original article here is
75:36
from CNET i'm just going to pop this up on the screen at&t warns 1,600 customers
75:42
of data breach so basically this wasn't
75:45
a systemic problem necessarily it wasn't
75:48
that uh AT&T was intentionally collecting this information and sharing
75:53
it with you know crappy folks or whatever the case may be this was a case
75:58
where a rogue employee went and stole this information and I think this
76:04
underlines um one of the real issues
76:07
with data collection the issue is not necessarily the terms of service because
76:12
this is clearly against AT&T's privacy policy the issue is that if you're
76:17
collecting the information someone somewhere may have access to it and
76:24
they're the problem that's not a policy issue that's just a people are people
76:29
and bad people are bad people um so I
76:32
don't I don't really know what to say the employees been fired and everyone affected has been contacted but uh I
76:38
mean what do what do you think Ryan do should we should we go tinfoil hat here
76:42
are we afraid of people having our information or should we should we trust
76:45
companies i mean this is really the oldest form of this that you'll ever
76:49
find right go back i mean bankers have
76:52
had access to your money for a hundred years right and and and and this this is
76:57
not going to go away if anything the computerization of these processes will
77:03
take people out of the process out of the out of the pipeline of these things
77:08
occurring and so you have less instances of this that doesn't make you more safe
77:11
of course as we've seen data breaches in other ways um this is more of a hey you
77:17
had a really crappy employee uh but that could happen at a hospital that could
77:21
happen at a bank that could happen at a a restaurant where the waitress has a
77:26
skimmer in her pocket right like right yep th those are all personnel issues
77:30
and there's always going to be uh people
77:33
in this world that are trying to do those types of things right so so would
77:38
you prefer a digital system versus a
77:41
human intervention system in this case then man I don't know i got to say the
77:46
the the scope of the theft here is so
77:50
small compared to what happens when something goes wrong with a digital
77:55
system true they only got 1,600 right
77:58
1,600 people had their information compromised and it sucks to be you like
78:03
it sucks for those people but we're not talking 100,000 or 160,000 people with
78:09
information compromised like what will happen uh who was it crap was it Target
78:14
that had a major problem with their POS system thousands and thousands of
78:18
customers information was compromised what was it credit card numbers yeah I
78:21
think so yeah can't remember the exact details but
78:25
I recently it was Home Depot and Jimmy John's like my my my bank called me a
78:31
couple weeks ago and said "Hey we're sending you a new checking account card." And I was like "Why?" He said
78:34
"Well we looked and you've shopped at Jimmy John's and Home Depot in the last
78:37
60 days so you're getting a new card." I was like "That sucks but hey thanks for
78:41
being proactive about it I guess uh it's it's interesting like there's uh there
78:45
was a service that I saw a Kickstarter for recently i can't remember the name
78:48
of it where it automatically generated a unique credit card number for each
78:53
merchant that you shopped at for example and then if that merchant ever had a
78:58
security issue that number would be automatically canled right and nobody
79:02
else had access to it so you didn't have to go through and change your card
79:05
information and change who pays your bills or or change all those other
79:09
companies just because one merchant screwed up uh it was a interesting idea
79:12
i don't know exactly how it worked necessarily uh but that that really
79:17
interesting yeah i I'm trying to remember what it was called uh I'm sure
79:20
somebody in the chat will will know eventually level I want to say level uh
79:25
uh level credit card i don't remember
79:29
what it was um but it was a it was a Kickstarter that basically had this
79:33
service right so anywhere you shopped online or even if you called somebody on
79:38
the phone you could generate a unique number for that merchant through their
79:42
app and and give it to them that way obviously if you have to swipe your card
79:45
I don't think that would work right but um it seemed like a good idea be cool i
79:49
mean I think we're going to have an issue with there only being so many
79:53
credit card numbers available and we might have kind of an IPv4 versus IPv6
79:58
type of issue here we're going to have to start adding like um you know alpha
80:03
characters to credit card numbers i mean this is going to happen eventually anyway but I mean I would that's a
80:09
really interesting approach it would have to be done by more than just one app maker like it would have to be the
80:14
banking system actually implementing this at a much higher level where each
80:18
individual has you know a thousand or tens or even hundreds of thousands of
80:22
potential credit card numbers applied to them and that would be a much faster way
80:27
to uh to narrow down data theft and uh and particularly financial data theft i
80:32
think it would be much less likely to happen in the US than Canada though just
80:35
because our central banking system allows us to do pretty much everything
80:38
faster than you guys you know whether it's uh chip based cards or even uh or
80:43
even pins versus signatures and all that kind of stuff
80:47
yeah we don't have chip and pin here yet they always say it's coming soon but
80:51
yeah sure whatever i I encountered one
80:54
and this is actually kind of a funny story uh if you don't mind if I just
80:57
kind of sure amble for a bit here i was down at PAX and I was on my way back and
81:02
I realized I didn't have enough gas to get home so I wanted to get something
81:05
while I was in the city i went to the gas station and I I went to pay at the
81:09
pump and it prompted me for my zip code of course I don't have a zip code i'm
81:13
not American so I was like "Oh crap write this this song and dance again."
81:18
So I have to go back I have to go into the station and I go to pay the guy he
81:22
asks "How much do you want?" I say "Oh I don't know man phillip." And so I he he
81:26
hands me the card thing and I go to swipe it and he says "Oh no no don't."
81:31
Right we're having a conversation before this and he asks where I'm from i tell
81:34
him I'm from Canada right so he hands me the thing i go to swipe it and he says
81:39
"I know you're not Canadian." And I kind of went "What?" He says "No I I know
81:44
you're not Canadian." I'm like "No I'm I'm Canadian." And like here here we've
81:48
got someone I'm trying to use a credit card with telling me they don't believe
81:52
my identity so I I I feel like I have a bit of a problem here right now and so
81:57
he says "Do you know how I know?" I'm like "Sure humor me." He goes "Because
82:02
you didn't try to put the chip reader in." And I go "Well okay Sherlock i'm in
82:08
America where they generally don't have chip readers." And so I went to swipe it
82:12
it's really You're not that much of a detective so he but he looked at my ID
82:16
really closely wow i was just like "Okay whatever man
82:23
we'll we'll get those one day sure you guys will catch up to you guys will
82:27
catch up to Canada someday good luck with that story of our life." Speaking
82:31
of catching up with Canada this segue makes no sense bridgestone releases
82:35
airfree tires you never have to inflate
82:38
this was posted by 13ca 350 on the forum
82:41
and the original article here is from CNET this is actually not the first time
82:47
we've seen any kind of you know airless tire attempted but this is the first
82:53
time that uh Bridgestone is really saying that hey these might actually be
82:59
not that bad this is their second gen tire and if you guys have a look at the
83:03
at the images here on CNET it actually looks pretty cool every part of it is
83:08
recyclable and um shock absorption is
83:11
handled by the by the shape hm of the
83:15
spokes here and uh yeah I wonder do they I'm sure they
83:21
do talk about it because they mentioned shock absorption but like I have run
83:25
flat tires on one of my car and they are
83:28
noticeably less uh let's say good in terms of ride
83:34
quality right uh especially when there's no air in them because I've had a flat
83:39
tire and a run flat before and it's it's very stiff after that so I I imagine I
83:43
mean the design looks pretty cool so they're I'm sure they're taking that
83:47
into consideration yeah they have a replaceable tread on them which is
83:51
another really cool thing i mean this is this looks like as much a sustainability
83:55
improvement as it is a a car maintenance and potentially safety improvement i
84:00
mean I think it'll be a long way before we see any kind of a commercial product
84:04
like something that you would put on a semi-truck like this but for consumer
84:08
vehicles other than the fact that it's so ugly I would never consider putting
84:11
it anywhere near even my car um it's
84:14
pretty exciting technology
84:19
uh you know you could I'm sure they could make it look better they could
84:22
hide the the weird stuff on the side with uh with with you know some kind of
84:27
design return of hubcaps let's do that return of hubcaps yeah yeah we if we hit
84:32
it enough that could probably work and then the return of hubcap theft uh yeah
84:38
okay that too yep or when they fly off on the highway and smash into somebody
84:42
else's windshield there's that too so yeah or that maybe we could have like
84:46
like a really nice plastic hub cap that just looks metal like maybe we'll really
84:50
get the hang of fake metal we'll finally figure that out yeah just paint it it's
84:56
fine so speaking of things that we're finally figuring out um we still haven't
85:01
finally figured out that people want more battery life in their phones but
85:05
HTC and this was posted on the forum by OP Monkey Matthew 78 HTC has finally
85:12
figured out that some people use their selfie cameras more than they actually
85:17
use their other cameras anyway so why don't we just produce a camera that has
85:21
a front-facing camera that's just as good as the back one the HTC1
85:26
M8i has two 13 megapixel cameras one on
85:31
the back on the front it takes 1080p video it even has a two-tone flash on
85:37
the front so you can really take pretty much almost the same quality photos with
85:42
the front camera as you can with the back one
85:47
brian do you take a lot of selfies uh no
85:50
I do not however this makes a lot of
85:53
sense like I think what's funny is I think this makes way more sense than the
85:58
phones that had the tiny screen on the back of it you remember those there was
86:02
Which one was it uh that had a a small screen on the back so you could see what
86:07
you were taking a picture of i remember maybe it wasn't a phone maybe it was a a
86:11
snapshot camera no I um I I had one i
86:15
had a um ah shoot what was it called i
86:18
don't know but the the fact that we even
86:21
went through that process was like I know we'll put a screen on the back and
86:25
when in reality what we should have done is put a better camera on the front i
86:29
guess determines which one was more expensive this is the Samsung Jive i had
86:34
one of these and it was a flip so here's
86:37
the uh here's the camera here i know this is really small image and it had a
86:41
small screen on the front for previewing messages and seeing the time and I
86:45
believe I could also use that front screen to line up photos yeah I think
86:51
there was I think there was like a uh a nonphone
86:55
um snapshot camera that had that as well maybe by Canon or Nikon or somebody that
86:59
had like a little screen on the front right next to the lens so you could see
87:02
what you were pointing it at when you did that um but yeah I this makes way
87:08
more sense so you've got a really nice screen already on the phone and just
87:13
take that camera and add another one I guess and I don't know is this an
87:17
exceptionally expensive phone by any measure i don't know i don't I don't
87:21
think so i don't think it really affected the cost too much at all i'm
87:24
setting up a straw poll here though guys i want to hear from you how many selfies
87:28
do you take per week if you're willing to admit it remember these straw polls
87:32
are anonymous yeah or as anonymous as anything is I guess somewhat anonymous
87:39
um so anyway let's just uh see if there's anything here I have to Okay so
87:42
it's gone quietly on sale in China for the equivalent of
87:47
$652 and will apparently only be a China
87:50
and India release at least for the foreseeable future why do they get
87:55
cooler stuff than us dual SIM better selfie cameras okay at least
87:59
dual SIM is cooler but why do they get better stuff than us uh our cell phone
88:04
carriers are a pain in the ass oh yeah yeah I guess there's that right so it
88:08
kind of it's kind of wild west out there is my understanding so
88:12
all right so it features autofocus um the Oh there's another camera too
88:17
there's the Desire Eye so that one is also a selfie optimized uh optimized
88:23
phone so they're they're both uh they're both coming out now we got to have a
88:27
look at the straw pull this was the one straw pull that I knew I had to do in
88:32
this video wow i bet I can predict the results so
88:37
the number of you that um maybe this is why we're not getting these cameras
88:42
because 83% of you say none you in
88:46
response to I think our audience on this show is uh very different than the
88:52
audience for any of these uh phones uh
88:55
however I know there are a lot of 12year-old girls out there that do this
89:00
all the time because I have a niece that does it and every time she sees me she's like "Oh let's get a picture." and she
89:04
holds it up and she puts it on Instagram and I go I don't know what's going on
89:07
anymore kill me now i'm I'm I'm 32 years old what are you doing to me that type
89:11
of thing uh I don't feel like I should feel this old
89:16
yet yeah yes exactly that uh but I I I
89:19
bet there's a pretty big market for it i
89:22
don't know you can sell anything why not
89:27
and yet we get the selfie phone but not the high high battery capacity phone
89:31
like are you freaking kidding me
89:35
so sad speaking of things that are sad Steam
89:39
releases Canadian pricing some game prices increased others remain the same
89:45
and some games currently unavailable for purchase in Canada no I don't know what
89:51
the issue is with Steam pricing just being in US dollars i mean maybe you
89:55
know what great opportunity to do a Twitter blitz guys hit me at Linus Tech
89:59
and let me know if you can think of some reason why it's not perfectly okay if
90:06
ultimately they're just going to be converting the pricing and then
90:09
displaying it in your own native currency anyway why it matters at all
90:13
that they don't just have US pricing because at least if it's a straight
90:16
conversion it's ultimately up to my credit card uh my credit card company
90:22
how much I'm paying in terms of fees which is usually not more than a couple
90:25
percent um over whatever the the nominal exchange rate is that you would get at
90:29
the bank why why do I need them to display it in my currency i mean they
90:32
were already displaying a conversion um well okay no no I don't think they
90:38
did actually but whatever xe.com is not exactly a difficult site to remember
90:43
what so before this you just purchased it in US dollars right yeah and then my
90:48
my credit card statement would say you
90:51
know 5721 Canadian $54.99 US in brackets now
90:57
you said that there were some games that
91:00
were no longer available after this yeah uh I don't understand why that would be
91:04
the case but they're probably going to get it fixed but my guess would be that
91:08
they rolled it out and it would have to do with something like agreeing with the
91:12
uh with the the game developer on what the price is going to be in the new
91:16
currency for example because a lot of stuff is not actually you're you're
91:20
American you might not know this a lot of stuff is not done just on a straight
91:24
conversion for example books are notorious for this because they'll have
91:28
a cover price right and you probably don't even have the Canadian cover price
91:32
it shows It shows both on our books okay you guys get both as well so you'll see
91:37
$4.99 US $7.99 Canadian sometimes mhm
91:41
significant price differences I suspect i just thought it was the tax for living
91:44
further north i don't know i just No no it's just it's based on some companies
91:50
actually lock their exchange rate as rarely as over multiple years i remember
91:56
back in 200 shoot I think it was 2008
92:00
2009 when the when the currency was all
92:03
over the place um and I forget who it
92:06
was but there was one Canadian company that only redid their um their exchange
92:11
rates I think once every two years or five years or something like that and
92:15
they basically sat there losing money for I think 6 to 10 months before they
92:20
finally wised up and went "Oh this isn't going to change so we should probably do
92:23
something about our pricing." Um so so
92:27
yeah NBA 2K15 went up 16.6% 6% from
92:31
$59.99 to $69.99 um which isn't that
92:34
reasonable overall the transition looks more smooth than when they added euros
92:38
in 2008 um where many games retained the
92:41
same numerical price but just in euros
92:45
when you I'm curious on Steam when you download uh in Canadian packets over
92:51
Steam does it download just as fast as you would expect like does it saturate
92:55
your bandwidth there does it okay yep i mean we're so close i mean we're we're
93:00
like I can spit to Valve i'm closer to Valve than you like
93:05
in terms of server locations there's no there's no penalty for the border and
93:08
the north to south connections are excellent okay yeah like I can play I
93:13
can play on Washingtonbased servers uh in in a game with very very low ping we
93:18
always joke about Jeremy on our podcast uh lives in Vancouver and we always joke
93:22
that whenever he has Skype issues it's because of Border Patrol blocking
93:27
packets across blocking packets the scary thing is that normally I would
93:32
kind of laugh at you and I'd go "Haha Ryan that's a funny joke." Except I with
93:36
all the stuff that's been going on with the NSA in the last year I wouldn't even
93:40
be that surprised to find out that someone is actually manually sorting
93:43
packets at the border well no this one's fine this one's fine this one's fine
93:47
nope not that Linus guy this one's fine yeah now not not this guy who's
93:50
teaagging the other player let's just go ahead and turn these packets off right
93:54
now yeah jackass Canadian
93:58
all right so I've got one more topic that um like to discuss a little bit uh
94:03
this was actually posted by FNOD on the forum uh the original source was a
94:09
little site you may or may not have heard of before called
94:12
pcp.com or something like that i don't know some some American guy runs it or
94:17
something like that um ARM and TSMC
94:20
apparently headed for 10 nanometer
94:24
d what does this mean what's what's going to happen man you know it doesn't
94:28
mean jack uh what the problem is so
94:33
telling Richard Heidi on you yeah well TSMC is a manufacturing facility that
94:39
makes chips for just about everybody AMD on the graphics side and on the
94:42
processor side somewhat um a and also
94:45
NVIDIA and also Apple and others and everybody right um their problem their
94:50
main competitor is actually Intel right Intel fab stuff primarily for themselves
94:55
they have a couple of odd jobs every once in a while so the the issue is is
94:59
we're at 22 nanometer today on Intel's
95:03
front and we're still kind of stuck on 28 kind of 20 nanometer uh on TSMC the
95:10
Apple on Intel's rolled out 14 sort Right broadwell is is 14 right and it's
95:16
just I guess it did kind of just actually start shipping in notebooks uh
95:20
this month so it did you're right um but in and the 20 nanometer from TSMC is
95:25
kind of a it's an odd conversation
95:29
because it's very limited production and it didn't have the benefits that a lot
95:34
of people expected to see for high performance parts that's why the Apple
95:38
A8 is being manufactured on it but no NVIDIA or AMD GPUs are being
95:43
manufactured on it even though you would think those would be the perfect ripe example for what should need a a uh a
95:48
dieice size decrease in process lower
95:51
power consumption faster switching speeds that sounds right up the GPU's
95:55
alley right so uh what what needs to happen now is TSMC and those other
96:00
groups are going into finfet production which is trigate 3D transistors which is
96:05
what Intel introduced in 22nter um and there are still they're still prepping
96:10
like their 16 nanometer finfet parts uh
96:13
TSMC and Global Foundaries and those guys are um and that will be kind of the
96:17
first iteration of it and so I think what happened was uh this was at uh on a
96:21
digit time story kind of came out around the ARM TechCon convention that was
96:26
happening out in Santa Clara that they were hey look we're on track for our 10
96:29
nanometer um taping out possibly in the
96:33
fourth quarter of 2015 and so what a tape out means is that you have you have
96:38
manufactured a chip to a specification that you approve of and so they can
96:42
begin the full manufacturing process uh
96:47
and sometimes you'll tape out two or three revisions before you actually
96:50
start the manufacturing process so right you know that they're talking about end
96:54
of 2015 for 10 nanometer which means
96:57
realistically mid to late 2016 before you actually see parts using that um but
97:03
I think we should be more concerned about how quickly they get to 16 nmter
97:07
and what that actually does will we you know some people predicted that you know
97:11
Maxwell NVIDIA's new chip is built on 28 nanometer um we all thought well six
97:17
months ago that it would be built on 20 nanometer and it wasn't the case uh
97:21
whether it be capacity issues whether it be technology issues some for some
97:25
reason it wasn't built on 20 we I think at this point we all kind of assume that
97:28
they're just going to wait they're going to to leaprog 20 and go down to 16
97:33
whenever that becomes available um AMD
97:36
the rumor is now that their next chip will actually be using 20 nanmter and so
97:40
we'll be able to see a comparison of what a chip can do one way or the other
97:45
uh and we may actually start to see AMD
97:49
and NVIDIA on opposing nodes of uh production right yeah
97:55
that'll be really interesting i mean that hasn't happened for an extended
97:58
period of time in a long time so with AMD at a lower at at a smaller
98:03
manufacturing process than NVIDIA for potentially months right yeah it it's it
98:09
would be very interesting i I Josh who
98:12
is on our show at pcpur.com he is a
98:16
manufacturing guy he knows all about this stuff way more than I do and his
98:20
kind of theory is that the 20 nmter probably doesn't offer a very big power
98:24
consumption or clock frequency advantage over 28 nanometer it's probably very
98:28
small uh and so the complication of moving your product from 28 down to 20
98:33
may not be worthwhile in the long run right so that would be and NVIDIA was
98:38
saying that the that the cost benefit didn't look like it made a ton of sense
98:42
for them as well yeah uh because you know when when they're talking about a
98:46
cost benefit they're not just really talking about the dollar benefit but the
98:50
dollar they have to spend per wafer what your yield is on that wafer determines
98:54
what each GPU's value is and then how much time you have to spend which is you
98:58
know engineering money to convert it
99:02
down to 20 nmter and fix it whereas with 28 they were very comfortable with it
99:05
they already knew it uh and they were able to build I think a pretty
99:09
compelling part based on it so yeah I'm
99:12
I'm surprised at how strong GTX 980 is I
99:16
wasn't I wasn't necessarily expecting them to be able to do that much with it
99:19
without a die shrink um so as much as it's as it's not what I really wanted
99:24
which was uh GM200
99:30
girl can dream right uh it's it's not a bad to wait for 210 just have to wait
99:35
for 210 just wait for GM210 it'll be fine
99:39
fair enough i'm sure it'll be here soon yeah I'm sure i don't know all right
99:44
well I think that's um that's pretty much it what time is it your time right
99:48
now it is 9:18 my time well I'm sure uh I'm sure your wife is
99:53
going to be super thrilled with me and I'll get you know more glares the next
99:58
time I run into her at an event no she was super nice she likes you now now
100:02
that she knows you she's totally fine with it i said "Hey I'm going to go be
100:05
on Linus' show on Friday is that cool?" She said "Oh yeah that's fine." Um you
100:10
know and you did make your show earlier it used to be much later um didn't you
100:16
used to do it 700 p.m pacific instead of 700 p.m eastern yeah I did that was way
100:21
more complicated cuz then I was getting sleepy by the end of it right i'm I'm an
100:25
old man i get tired all right well guys
100:28
thanks so much for watching thanks to our sponsors linda.com and Phantom Glass
100:33
and thanks to our special guest Mr ryan Shrout from PC Purr for those of you who
100:37
are just tuning in later on in the show here Ryan do you want to give them one
100:40
more sort of where to find you i absolutely do i absolutely do so
100:44
pcpur.com is our website with all of our reviews camera self-promoter i'm gonna
100:48
I'm gonna plug my YouTube channel as well because we're on there look you
100:52
have so many more subscribers than me it's not even a competition if you want
100:56
to watch videos about PC hardware our channel is
100:59
youtube.com/pcpur i mean we don't do as cool of videos as Lionus does he doesn't
101:04
walk around on his roof with a 100 foot uh USB cable i did I No I don't I didn't
101:09
do that i did run a 500 foot Ethernet
101:12
cable once okay that worked successfully
101:16
that's almost as cool uh and it got run over by a lawn mower so there was that
101:21
and then it didn't work that's unfortunate go figure so th just those
101:25
places if you I mean if you want to find me on Twitter it's just Ryan Ryan Shrout
101:28
as well so uh anytime you want to have me back on this is fun it's cool i like
101:32
talking with different group i did see a couple people in the Twitter chat asking me to tell you all about the wonders of
101:37
IRC oh oh okay yeah the because you guys use
101:41
IRC for your chat right yeah we do i think it's part of our partner agreement
101:45
with Twitch that we don't use alternate chats fair enough fair enough so there's
101:50
one reason why we might do things the way that we do things something that I
101:53
think viewers a lot of time don't realize is that there's probably a
101:57
hundred reasons behind the scenes why we do something the way that we do it
102:00
versus what's immediately obvious and and apparent but uh yeah that's that's
102:05
that's the reason we don't do it and you know what twitch chat isn't that bad i
102:10
think that I enjoy watching it i enjoy participating in it so I I'm in there i
102:15
My name's popping up every once in a while here and there we go so yeah i see
102:19
a lot of people tweeting about how they hate you and they never want to see you as a guest again so I understand i know
102:24
i get it all the time i see why you're I see why you're trying to invite yourself
102:27
back to try and like counter what they're saying no we'll definitely have
102:30
you back again Ryan thank you very much and uh good night everyone we'll see you
102:35
again same bat time same bat channel next week um I actually don't remember
102:39
who our guest is for next week but I think we might be having Paul and Kyle
102:42
formerly of New Egg TV back so uh stay tuned for that and good night
102:51
everybody sorry it takes a while to switch scenes because uh Oh oh and I've
102:56
got this thing over here
103:04
d ah why is this the one with I got to
103:07
just delete the one with no audio at some point that That would make a lot
103:11
more sense cuz I keep accidentally putting it here and then I never check
103:16
it because I'm usually like throwing myself into my chair here to get the
103:21
show started today I arrived back at the office at 2:30 and I shot an unboxing as
103:27
well as a full line of tech tips and then some B-roll for another one before
103:31
starting the show so like it's just You did good you did fine we did We didn't
103:36
We didn't need a uh a Skype pretest we
103:39
got this stuff down yeah that's right
103:42
skype what could go wrong nothing goes wrong with Skype and turn