#PC Optimization

[quirknow]

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[digitalbytes]

Is Intel's New CPU Better Than AMD's New CPU? Let's Break It Down

When it comes to choosing the best CPU for your needs, the rivalry between Intel and AMD is always a topic of debate. Both brands have released some incredible processors recently, but which one is truly better? Is Intel's new CPU really that much better than AMD's new CPU? Well, the answer isn't as clear-cut as you might think.

Intel's latest processors, like the Intel Core i7 and Intel Core i9 from their 13th generation, have brought significant performance improvements. They boast faster clock speeds, enhanced multi-core capabilities, and better single-threaded performance, making them a great choice for gaming and multitasking. But is that enough to outdo AMD’s latest offerings, like the AMD Ryzen 7000 series?

AMD’s processors are no slouches either. With impressive multi-threaded performance, better power efficiency, and a more affordable price tag, AMD has been dominating in certain segments, especially for users looking for solid performance on a budget.

So, which one is better? It really depends on what you're looking for. If you need maximum single-threaded performance for tasks like gaming or software that demands high clock speeds, Intel might be the better option. But, if you want a CPU that excels in multi-core tasks, provides great value, and runs cooler, AMD could be your winner.

At the end of the day, both brands offer high-performance CPUs that deliver excellent results. It’s important to understand your needs and choose the one that aligns with your computing requirements. Whether you choose Intel or AMD, rest assured that you're getting top-tier performance.

Visit Blumenit Computer for more information on the latest CPUs and expert guidance on making the right choice for your build.

[alltechqueries]

iolo System Mechanic Review: Does It Really Improve Performance?

In the world of PC optimization, iolo System Mechanic stands out as a highly regarded tool designed to boost system performance and ensure smoother operation. iolo System Mechanic has gained significant popularity among users seeking to enhance their computer’s speed, stability, and overall efficiency. This powerful system mechanic software is known for its comprehensive suite of features that…

[techgeeksite]

How to Fix Sound Problems in Windows 10

Key Takeaways Verify that your audio isn’t muted in Windows, that any physical mute switches aren’t enabled, and check app settings for audio issues. Make sure the correct audio device is selected as the output device, either through the taskbar or Control Panel. Try running the Windows Audio Troubleshooter, rebooting audio services, disabling audio enhancements, and changing the audio format.…

[tricksfunn]

Advanced SystemCare Pro v17: Tune-Up Your PC for Peak Performance (Free License)

Is your PC feeling sluggish? Taking forever to load programs? Advanced System Care Pro v17 aims to tackle these woes and breathe new life into your machine. Let’s explore what this recently released optimization suite has to offer. Boost Speed and Clean Up Deep Advanced SystemCare Pro v17 boasts an AI-powered cleaning mode that identifies and removes junk files, temporary data, and leftover…

[newspatron]

Unleash Your PC's Power: Master the Jungle with Microsoft PC Manager

Share your PC optimization tips and questions in the comments below! Let's conquer the digital jungle together!

Feeling overwhelmed by a sluggish PC, overflowing storage, and lurking security threats? Fear not, weary traveler! Microsoft PC Manager emerges from the digital wilderness, a powerful tool ready to tame the jungle of your computer and restore peace and order.This comprehensive guide will equip you with everything you need to know about Microsoft PC Manager, from its core features to its benefits…

[cheapgeeky]

Syncing RGB Lighting Across Brands: Why It's Tricky and How to Do It

If you’ve recently made the mistake of purchasing an RGB device from a manufacturer that isn’t the same as your other goodies, you might find yourself frustrated because you can’t sync everything up. Fortunately, we have just the right solution for your RGB needs. Why Don’t We Have a Universal RGB Standard? When RGB devices started gaining popularity, hardware manufacturers scrambled to create…

[mbishiri]

System Mechanic includes everything you need to get started with tuning up your PC without requiring any additional knowledge or skills. It takes the work off the user by automatically cleaning the PC and providing faster processing speeds.

[jerichoes]

Bojan Cvjetićanin // Joker Out (5/5)

[zeravmeta]

im sorry to the baldurs gate enjoying mutuals but i just saw a post saying hes as sexy as alucard castlevania and im allowed to be a hater on my blog

[digitalbytes]

Boost Your PC Performance with Blumenit Computer: The Best in Tech Solutions

Looking to enhance your PC’s performance or upgrade to the latest tech? At Blumenit Computer, we offer top-quality hardware and expert solutions for all your computing needs. Whether you need powerful processors like the Intel Core i7 for gaming, content creation, or general use, or you're in search of high-performance GPUs, we’ve got you covered.

From laptops to desktop components, our extensive range of products ensures that you find exactly what you're looking for. Need advice on the best options for your system? Our knowledgeable team is here to guide you through the process, ensuring you make informed decisions.

Visit Blumenit Computer today and elevate your tech experience with the best in the business!

[devsgames]

Game Optimization and Production

I wanted to write a bit of a light primer about optimization and how it relates to game production in the event people just don't know how it works, based on my experience as a dev. I'm by no means an expert in optimization myself, but I've done enough of it on my own titles and planned around it enough at this point to understand the gist of what it comes down to and considerations therein. Spoilers: games being unoptimized are rarely because devs are lazy, and more because games are incredibly hard to make and studios are notoriously cheap.

(As an aside, this was largely prompted by seeing someone complaining about how "modern" game developers are 'lazy' because "they don't remember their N64/Gamecube/Wii/PS2 or PS3 dropping frames". I feel compelled to remind people that 'I don't remember' is often the key part of the "old consoles didn't lag" equation, because early console titles ABSOLUTELY dropped frames and way more frequently and intensely than many modern consoles do. Honestly I'd be willing to bet that big budget games on average have become more stable over time. Honorable mention to this thread of people saying "Oh yeah the N64 is laggy as all hell" :') )

Anywho, here goes!

Optimization

The reason games suffer performance problems isn't because game developers are phoning it in or half-assing it (which is always a bad-faith statement when most devs work in unrealistic deadlines, for barely enough pay, under crunch conditions). Optimization issues like frame drops are often because of factors like ~hardware fragmentation~ and how that relates to the realities of game production.

I think the general public sees "optimization" as "Oh the dev decided to do a lazy implementation of a feature instead of a good one" or "this game has bugs", which is very broad and often very misguided. Optimization is effectively expanding the performance of a game to be performance-acceptable to the maximum amount of people - this can be by various factors that are different for every game and its specific contexts, from lowering shader passes, refactoring scripts, or just plain re-doing work in a more efficient way. Rarely is it just one or two things, and it's informed by many factors which vary wildly between projects.

However, the root cause why any of this is necessary in the first place is something called "Platform Fragmentation".

What Is Fragmentation

"Fragmentation" is the possibility space of variation within hardware being used to run a game. Basically, the likelihood that a user is playing a game on a different hardware than the one you're testing on - if two users are playing your game on different hardware, they are 'fragmented' from one another.

As an example, here's a graphic that shows the fragmentation of mobile devices based on model and user share. The different sizes are how many users are using a different type of model of phone:

As you can tell, that's a lot of different devices to have to build for!

So how does this matter?

For PC game developers, fragmentation means that an end-user's setup is virtually impossible to predict, because PC users frequently customize and change their hardware. Most PC users potentially have completely different hardware entirely.

Is your player using an up-to-date GPU? CPU? How much RAM do they have? Are they playing on a notebook? A gaming laptop? What brand hardware are they using? How much storage space is free? What OS are they using? How are they using input?

Moreover PC parts don't often get "sunsetted" whole-cloth like old consoles do, so there's also the factor of having to support hardware that could be coming up on 5, 10 or 15 years old in some cases.

For console developers it's a little easier - you generally know exactly what hardware you're building for, and you're often testing directly on a version of the console itself. This is a big reason why Nintendo's first party titles feel so smooth - because they only build for their own systems, and know exactly what they're building for at all times. The biggest unknowns are usually smaller things like televisions and hookups therein, but the big stuff is largely very predictable. They're building for architecture that they also made themselves, which makes them incredibly privileged production-wise!

Fragmentation basically means that it's difficult - or nearly impossible - for a developer to know exactly what their users are playing their games on, and even more challenging to guarantee their game is compatible everywhere.

Benchmarking

Since fragmentation makes it very difficult to build for absolutely everybody, at some point during development every developer has to draw a line in the sand and say "Okay, [x] combination of hardware components is what we're going to test on", and prioritize that calibre of setup before everything else. This is both to make testing easier (so testers don't have to play the game on every single variation of hardware), and also to assist in optimization planning. This is a "benchmark".

Usually the benchmark requirements are chosen for balancing visual fidelity, gameplay, and percentage of the market you're aiming for, among other considerations. Often for a game that is cross-platform for both PC and console, this benchmark will be informed by the console requirements in some way, which often set the bar for a target market (a cross-platform PC and console game isn't going to set a benchmark that is impossible for a console to play, though it might push the limits if PC users are the priority market). Sometimes games hit their target benchmarks, sometimes they don't - as with anything in game development it can be a real crap shoot.

In my case for my games which are often graphically intensive and poorly made by myself alone, my benchmark is often a machine that is approximately ~5 years old and I usually take measures to avoid practices which are generally bad and can build up to become very expensive over time. Bigger studios with more people aiming at modern targets will likely prioritize hardware from within the last couple years to have their games look the best for users with newest hardware - after all, other users will often catch up as hardware evolves.

This benchmark allows devs to have breathing room from the fragmentation problem. If the game works on weaker machines - great! If it doesn't - that's fine, we can add options to lower quality settings so it will. In the worst case, we can ignore it. After all, minimum requirements exist for a reason - a known evil in game development is not everyone will be able to run your game.

Making The Game

As with any game, the more time you spend on something is the more money being spent on it - in some cases, extensive optimization isn't worth the return of investment. A line needs to be drawn and at some point everyone can't play your game on everything, so throwing in the towel and saying "this isn't great, but it's good enough to ship" needs to be done if the game is going to ship at all.

Optimizing to make sure that the 0.1% of users with specific hardware can play your game probably isn't worth spending a week on the work. Frankly, once you hit a certain point some of those concerns are easier put off until post-launch when you know how much engagement your game has, how many users of certain hardware are actually playing, and how much time/budget you have to spend post-launch on improving the game for them. Especially in this "Games As A Service" market, people are frequently expecting games to receive constant updates on things like performance after launch, so there's always more time to push changes and smooth things out as time goes on. Studios are also notoriously squirrelly with money, and many would rather get a game out into paying customer's hands than sit around making sure that everything is fine-tuned (in contrast to most developers who would rather the game they've worked on for years be fine-tuned than not).

Comparatively to the pre-Day One patch era; once you printed a game on a disc it is there forever and there's no improving it or turning back. A frightening prospect which resulted in lots of games just straight up getting recalled because they featured bugs or things that didn't work. 😬

Point is though, targeted optimization happens as part of development process, and optimization in general often something every team helps out with organically as production goes on - level designers refactor scripts to be more efficient, graphics programmers update shaders to cut down on passes, artists trim out poly counts where they can to gradually achieve better performance. It's an all-hands-on-deck sort of approach that affects all devs, and often something that is progressively tracked as development rolls on, as a few small things can add up to larger performance issues.

In large studios, every developer is in charge of optimizing their own content to some extent, and some performance teams are often formed to be dedicated to finding the easiest, safest and quickest optimization wins. Unless you plan smartly in the beginning, some optimizations can also just be deemed to dangerous and out-of-reach to carry out late in production, as they may have dependencies or risk compromising core build stability - at the end of the day more frames aren't worth a crashing game.

Conclusion

Games suffer from performance issues because video game production is immensely complex and there's a lot of different shifting factors that inform when, how, and why a game might be optimized a certain way. Optimization is frequently a production consideration as much as a development one, and it's disingenuous to imply that games lag because developers are lazy.

I think it's worth emphasizing that if optimization doesn't happen, isn't accommodated, or perhaps is undervalued as part of the process it's rarely if ever because the developers didn't want to do it; rather, it's because it cost the studio too much money. As with everything in our industry, the company is the one calling the final shots in development. If a part of a game seems to have fallen behind in development it's often because the studio deemed it acceptable, refused to move deadlines or extend a hand to help it come together better at fear of spending more money on it. Rarely if ever should individual developers be held accountable for the failings of companies!

Anywho, thanks for reading! I know optimization is a weird mystical sort of blind spot for a lot of dev folks, so I hope this at least helps shed some light on considerations that weigh in as part of the process on that :) I've been meaning to write a more practical workshop-style step-by-step on how to profile and spot optimization wins at some point in the future, but haven't had the time for it - hopefully I can spin something up in the next few weeks!

[techgeeksite]

Do I Need a New Motherboard? 7 Things to Consider

Desktop computers have upgradability as one of their major selling points. When something breaks or becomes outdated, you can just swap it for a newer part and everything runs smooth again. However, as technology evolves, sometimes the components currently in the market simply won’t fit into your computer’s slots. That’s when one needs to consider getting a new motherboard. But how to know if…

[hipstersoulgushers]

[powdermelonkeg]

Alright so ive been thinking about it (probably far too much) and want a second opinion.

Tears of the Kingdom and Baldurs Gate 3 were the same price.

TotK gave me a total of like. I think it was 160 hours to 100% completion (koroks ignored) in my case. And then i set it down and have had no urge to touch it again.

I'm about 120 hours into BG3 now. I have not completed my first playthrough, and I expect Ive still got some 30 hours left of it. I DO intend to play through it again, and I know that there are countless things left for me to do in it still.

And like. I ENJOYED TotK. It was a blast. But looking at BG3 now, complete with its 3 stage city map, like five other maps too, full voice acting, complex storyline, multiple endings, replayability, etc.

It has me realizing that TotK reused its old map. The only major addition was a procedurally generated single-biome underworld and a couple of floating islands (several of which were copy pasted around the map). Most of its gameplay was already built on the previous game.

So the thought I keep coming back to then is that TotK was fine. It was fun. But if BG3 is a 70 dollar game, then TotK has no good reason to be any more than $40.

But I think youre more into both games than I have been, so I wanna know your thoughts.

Sat on this for a little bit and...yeah. $40 is a good price for it.

Like, I'm not too mad about the map thing. BG3 was in production since BotW came out, while TotK started in 2019 and has to deal with a physics environment. I know what I'm getting into with a Nintendo game when I buy one, I know the level of writing and effort (and railroading) to expect. But the price thing has been a thorn in my side that I've ignored for...awhile.

I do think BG3 deserved another year to cook. Maybe two. I'm extremely GLAD it came out when it did, because I found it when I did, but the third act, for all its complexity, has a lot of loose ends that need tying together. Which, I also am not mad about. When you've had Pokemon-level writing for most of your life, and you connect dots in Zelda, literally any snippet of BG3 writing feels incredible. Even the worst bits of Baldur's Gate are so rich in comparison to the Nintendo games I play. But I DO think that they rushed themselves, and they definitely did it so as to not compete with Starfield.

Which is like...I've spent a decade evaluating whole wheat bread, and you've put a massive chocolate cake in front of me. I'm not going to care that the icing on the third tier isn't as fancy as the first two. I am kind of going to lament that the baker had to rush it out the door, though.

Also BG3 replayability >>>>>>>>> TotK replayability. Like, it's past Skyrim levels. I love games where my choices matter and aren't retconned.