330: Our E-Cores Are Better Than Your P-Cores

Brad, I did the unthinkable. Oh. I submitted I've you've you gotta Yeah. Attenuate these intros a little bit. Look, we're through we're through the looking glass here, man. It's a whole new world. At this late date, words like unthinkable maybe get the hackles up a little more than I can handle. Look.

Okay. Maybe it's unthinkable for me. Okay. In the context of like some nerdy computer project shit, it's unthinkable, let's say. Yeah, I I not like pull requests man. Not like you started digging an underground shelter or something. Okay, I do watch a lot of tunnel videos on YouTube. Uh-huh. There's that woman that's dug the tunnel under her house. Uh I don't know if you I don't have you are you into

co the cold comfort of underground lodging. Not yet, but maybe I should be. I can't f well first this started for me with Colin Furs, right? Colin Furs, that YouTube guy. He builds like crazy engineering. I think he started out as a welder, but he builds like motorcycles with giant counterweighted balances on the top so you couldn't ride on the motorcycle like fifteen feet in the air. Um

And uh sounds useful. He dug a hole in his backyard and put a home theater in it. All right. Uh like a like a twenty foot by twenty foot home theater. And then he started making tunnels that connected that to the house. And the thing he's been working on for like two and a half years now is digging up his front his front driveway in like a UK kind of suburban home and putting an elevator. underground garage with an elevator that can lower his DeLorean in underneath it.

It's one it's one way to maximize your space. You should look at the YouTube. It's a good YouTube series'cause it's when you own the property above ground, you also own the space below the ground level, right? Well see that it's funny, that's what he thought. And then the local authorities had different feelings about that. So

Uh anyway, I have not started digging yet is the to answer your question. Okay. That's fair. Al also I'm gonna say that burying your home theater in the ground is an interesting way to solve the blackout curtain problem. Yeah.

I think he probably created a much larger echoing problem'cause he built it out of steel. Oh played steel and stuff. Yeah, you need you need something absorbent on the inside. Yeah, and also it looks it looks wet in there in a way that I maybe wouldn't be thrilled with. Yeah. But also think of how cool it would be to have like a whole like I I used to as a kid I had dreams we used to get um stuff shipped in like these wooden containers from the UK for my parents' business.

And they were like six feet on a side. And we made we would we would knock they were uh just kind of throw away fur wood. And we would cut holes inside and put a door there and then connect'em and make like a fort in the backyard. That is that is some prime fort material as a child. It's like having infinite stacks of pallets, basically. Yeah. And uh I always thought, what if we dug a hole and buried a couple of these and then we'd have an underground space underneath the fort?

That was like that. And my parents were like, No, we're not putting you in a hole'cause that's how how people die, you know, trenching problems. But anyway. Okay, so it's not about me digging a hole. That's the the unthinkable is not that. You got any other guesses what the unthinkable is? I I think I heard you say the words pull request at the beginning which, you know, for certain definitions of unthinkable I think qualifies.

I never thought I'd be a pull request guy. Man, you beat me to it. I know. I almost submitted my first pull request like a month ago and somebody actually beat me somebody beat me to it there also like They found the same issue that I did. Yep. And they filed the pull request before I did, so I'm like, maybe maybe best of both worlds, because now the thing's getting fixed and I didn't have to deal with it.

So we talked yeah, that that's much better than having to figure it out. Like I had to look up I had to it was like that scene in office space where like how do you launder money and they looked it up in the dictionary or whatever and I I was it was basically the equivalent of You know, how do you make a pull request? So okay, set the stage. What's the project? What was the bug? How did you fix it?

So the uh problem is that I have an AIO water cooler in my system. Oh, I know where I think I know where this is going'cause I saw you asking about building kernel modules on the full nerd discord. Yep. And uh and they uh are lightly supported by a bunch of different projects. HW Mon has some support.

uh liquid control has some support, but there's a process by which new hardware is supported and it usually starts in liquid control and then somebody kind of ports whatever reverse engineering or whatever like ID hardware ID identifying business had to happen. Down into HW Mon. And then once it's in there, you can do things like use cooler control on Linux, which is a fabulous utility that's kind of like a souped up version of fan control.

And I got tired a couple of weeks ago of b basing my AIO fan curves on like the thermistor that I kinda taped up on the side of the of the radiator. And uh I started Googling to find out what was supported and what wasn't. And it turns out my family of coolers has a pretty good liquid control driver. Bye. They're Asus, it's an Asus cooler and they do different hardware IDs.

for like the different SKUs. So like there's uh one that's like one color and there's one that's like robot themed and one that's white and one that's a two forty and one that's a three sixty. And they all are different hardware IDs so that are so that their software can identify them and know what stuff to put on the screen.

So I was like, I would like for mine to be s l supported by this and I looked at how to add that support and I downloaded I I cloned the repo onto my machine and I made the necessary changes in the in the Python files. And uh I restarted the the service and it worked.

And I was like, who wrote or maintains this driver, just out of curiosity? So the SUSE right? No, this is not a SUS. There's a project called Liquid Control, Liquid C T R L or CTL. The same project is also doing the driver. Yeah, so it's the same project on um on Windows and Linux and like fan control actually has a liquid control plugin on the Windows side that you can control like a whole buttload of supported uh AIOs with.

Um, and and the the reason you do this is so you can get specifically the temperature of the coolant inside the loop rather than basing it your your fan speed on on like the CPU usage or CPU temperature because the CPU temperature goes up and down, but the liquid temperature moves really slowly. And in an AIO loop, you want to base your your fan curves on the the temperature of the liquid, not necessarily the moment to moment. spikes in the in the CPU temperature.

Uh so I looked up and and the n the nice thing about Linux in this is that if you have the AIO hooked up to a Linux machine, it's really easy to get those USB IDs for all the relevant pieces of hardware. Uh which is kind of tricky on the Windows side actually, because you have to pull you have to pull a handful of things and

basically integrate them in this in this Python file and update some documentation. And uh I got it working on my machine and then I updated liquid control a couple days later by accident. It stopped working. I was like, oh crap. Okay. So I did the work again.

And I was like, I'm gonna submit this. And I was like, can I just like copy and paste the file into GitHub? No, you can't do that. You first make a fork of the project, then you make your changes in your version of the project, commit them to your version of the project.

And then you go back to the original project and you hit the button that says new pull request and you say, I want to do my version of this project against their version of this project. There's five changes or eight changes or whatever. And uh most projects have like a little thing that you fill out that says, Yeah, I tested this and I I did here's what I did, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Uh it did all the things that you want me to do to before you submit a a pull request.

And then I hit the button that said that and like two days later it was in the it was in the pro it was in the software and you can download it from uh From uh the repo. You got merged. Yeah. And then I did the same thing again the next week for HW Mon. That's cool. That's cool. I that that's okay, that's roughly what I uh understood the process to be before I gave up or rather in instead of giving up on it, like I said, somebody else did it first. Yeah.

It was about the point where I realized I was going to have to fork and clone the repo, do it on my end, and then kind of effectively backport the change into the upstream. Uh like, look, I get it. I know that's the process. I'm sure it's all second nature once you've done it a couple times, but there was definitely a brief moan of like This is a lot of steps. I'm not sure I have time for this.

The forka. I wish it was a little more direct. I mean I know it's like basically c one button to forca. A repo. Yeah, you can fork stuff left and right. It's th they they're you're forking stuff all over the place up and but but no that part it's funny, that part I've done before because I use um I use Git pages to host uh like w like static web pages for a couple of projects that I've I've helped people with in the past.

And so I was pretty familiar with that stuff. But the but the doing the merging the commits and and how to do all that was was weird because Like I had actually forked somebody else's fork of the project because they'd done the initial for the HWMON thing. I had forked somebody else's fork because they had done the changes for the overall support of the device, and I just needed to add hardware IDs to their support. Um, so then I had to figure out how to like

change my changes on their version and and anyway. So then the next step is Git is a whole thing. Git Git is Git is a thing, man. I I use I just use a a a bear. This is this is here I am burning a Dual boot diaries topic if I were to ever show up on there, although I think you guys maybe have covered similar stuff already, but I I use just a plain bare git repo to sync my dot files between.

machines and I know basically just enough Git to push and pull those changes and commit files when I change them. Anytime anything breaks in there, it's thirty minutes of Googling. arcane git error messages and running commands I don't really understand. Well so so the weird thing about Git is every game studio I've ever worked at has one person who's actually good at Git and then a bunch of people who have a post-it note stuck on their monitor that are like

The three commands that they use for Git all the time. Yeah, that's my experience. But then the other weird thing about Git is in games at least. Most studios are using Perforce, at least big studios are using Perforce for all the binary stuff. So the art files and the models and all that and the game assets and all that stuff.

But the program uh and and because Git is kind of notoriously bad about binaries, right? It's it's hard to to do. Even the LFS product, which is specifically for syncing binaries, is not great at Perforce really good at that, but the programmers hate Perforce. So Perforce has a translation layer where you can use git commands on the Perforce repository for the engineers who are mostly working in text files.

And then the artists are just using the perforce client like sane people from inside their game engine. Anyway, syncing files is hard, it turns out. It sure is. Just like a lot of things in computers.

Welcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod. I'm Will. I'm Brad. So the next step on that whole thing is I gotta figure out GKMS. Oh boy. I can I can kinda help. Kind of. Like I I might you I've done some DKMSing. Well you're on you're still on Cashey, right? I'm on Art. Yeah, it's basically Arch. I think I think there's two there's two ways to Automate kernel module building DKMS, which I know Debian uses and I think Arch also uses. Yeah. And then then there's AK mods, which is

more in the Red Hat land, Red Hat and Fedora use that instead. Well I think you can you can you can install DKMS on Fedora instead if you want, but yeah, like I I've got I've I've done a little bit of DKMSing to um Sign ZFS modules with my secure boot keys when they get built. I'm just gonna afraid I'm gonna DKMS some stuff up, so I gotta be careful. But I I get it. I get it. Speaking of messing things up, uh it's Newsweek. Whoa.

Wait, who's mess who's messing up? I I don't think we've messed anything up. I was just I was it was just a bad segue. That was not a nice segue. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I I'm off is I've been at GDC a lot this week and uh the game developer conference.

with the new reduced year Bibuena access. Oh, is that the whole gardens thing that I've seen? Yeah, people are upset. It's it sucks. It's bad. What is it they're upset about? I'm not clear. So uh the controversy this year, the me the mess up is that traditionally, you know, Muscone Above Moscone North, there's a big giant park called Yerba Buena Gardens. It's been there for a really long time. It's like between the Metreon and the Yerba Buena Arts Center.

And uh it's where people go to hang out during GDC. So like if you don't have a ticket, you can go and you just need to have some meetings with people. You go there and you ha hang out and have a meeting. Um if you're in between like running around to different hotels where there are meetings constantly, stuff like that. It's it's a nice it's it's nice to touch grass, as the kids say. Mm-hmm. And uh this year, the Yerba Buena Conservancy

started letting people who are having events in that area fence the whole park off. Uh-huh. So that it's no no longer accessible to the public and is only accessible to badge holders. GDC concession was that it was open to the public from eleven till two in the morning.

Which is like, you know, considering that normally you'd walk around there during G D C and there'd be fifteen hundred people sitting around in the grass and all like kinda all around hanging out and chatting with friends and having a nice time. It stinks. It's a bad choice. Hopefully they'll change it for next year. Is it is it owned by the city? No, it's owned by the Yerba Bueno Arts Conservative Conservancy or Gardens or whatever project, I believe.

Uh but anyway, so uh GDC's fine. But there's some we got some news though. We got yeah, we got some GDC news, we got some other news. Like kind of a shocking amount of hardware stuff happened in the last week. Yeah, in a in a world where hardware is hard to get. Right. Yeah. Well although a lot of it is kind of uh future look I mean well, okay, I mean we c we can foreshadow here, right? Uh Intel announced some new core s Aero Lake CPUs. Mm-hmm.

Uh, Apple launched it the cheapest laptop they've ever announced and it seems like it's pretty good. Yeah. And interesting. My uh PlayStation announced uh an update for PSSR. Yeah. Pretty minor one there, but there's stuff to talk about. Uh NVIDIA's rolling out the G Force uh the DLSS four point five stuff that they kinda teased earlier this year for G Force five series cards, I guess. Is that coming out now? I think it's the end of the month. So okay. Interesting. All right. Um and then

D details have emerged on Microsoft's plans for the Xbox? I think that's the big one. You wanna start like this? Well, it is it is the big one in terms of the scope of the news and how much detail there or how kind of how important and fresh and bleeding edged the the information is. On the other hand, it's also vague that I feel like we have to read between a lot of lines and speculate about what they're getting at in some cases. But

Like just to put a overview on this, this seems like the kind of thing they wouldn't be talking about if they were still selling a lot of hardware. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. That well, though the the current Xbox hardware business is basically moribund as I understand it. I kinda wonder how the current hard hard console hardware business is. I mean, I obviously Nintendo's sold some units'cause they managed to sell more than two million copies of Pokopia.

Uh but but uh yeah, I I don't I I can't imagine that like PlayStation Pros are flying off the shelves right now either. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. Yeah, and even even the base PS5, the price is up from what it was at launch.

Yeah. Or so yeah. Anyway, yeah, all all these other stories are iterative. They're all interesting in one way or another, but they're all kind of building on existing stuff. Project Helix is the next Xbox and like that's all br new. That's a whole new box that's coming.

Dot dot dot next year or the year after or the year after that. Well they So So that that is the place to start for sure. There's some timing. So let's what what's the what's the top line, Brad? It's called Project or okay, sorry, it's not called Project Helix, but that's the official code name. They came out and put a label on it. It is the next Xbox. They're bringing AI to uh video games. But it's also PC?

Well, I thought everything's an Xbox. So your PC's an Xbox, your microphone's an Xbox, your your your game frame's an Xbox, your Sin City poster. Those are all Xboxes, right? Anything can be an Xbox if you want it, bad enough. Who did this talk? Uh I believe it was Jason Ronald. Okay. Uh he's he's the byline on they ran a uh news story on Xbox Wire that says it is in fact it says this is a summary of the keynote address.

And it's byline it's byline Jason Ron I've heard I've I've talked to Jason Ronald before and heard him speak like he he extremely knows his stuff. Okay. Uh at the platform and hardware level. But um I mean Asha Sharma, who's the new head of Xbox as of what, three weeks ago or whenever it was, time I don't think it was that long ago. I think it was last week or the week before. Maybe it was two weeks ago. Time makes no sense now, but

She had tweeted some of the top line stuff of this last week, I believe it was, so some of this was floating around out there. Project Helix is designed to play your Xbox console and PC games. Like that's the log line here. Like they've are confirming the thing they have said in the past. Or I'm sorry, not the thing they've said, but in the past, thing that's been rumored in the past, which is that this will play

Both Xbox and P C games, I feel like there are so many different ways to interpret that that we have to like unpack what this means exactly. Is is there gonna be an Epic game store and a Steam on your Xbox next in on your Helix? So so Epic did come out two, three weeks ago and say, yes, we are talking to Microsoft and we want to be on the next Xbox day one with the Epic Game Store. Well, they want that because they don't want to give Microsoft a cut of the Fortnite revenue, right?

Sure, I guess not. I mean that's because that's our whole thing. That that leads to like one of my first questions about this thing though is or actually they're all the same question just approached from multiple angles. Yeah. Okay. Is this thing just going to run vanilla windows where you can drop to a desktop? Is it gonna have all the runtime support that you would need to run like any piece of Windows software you want? Or is this going to be runs your PC games asterisk?

where they're having these platform holders build like custom versions of the storefront apps for this Xbox. Games are maybe gonna have to get like Helix verified or whatever, you know, PC games. Yeah. Won't necessarily like like your your fifteen year old indie game that hasn't seen a patch in twelve years. Is that gonna run straight out of your Steam library or is it gonna be is there gonna be more of a certification requirement or like some amount of like

translation or compatibility that needs to be in place for games to work? Is it gonna be a subset of your games? Or are they gonna do like some sort of weird translation layer where they look at your Steam library and are like, Oh, he owns a copy of Fez there, so we'll just give him the Xbox version of Fez to play here when he wants to play. Yeah, I don't know. I can't imagine that that seems less likely. Yeah. Yeah, that that seems that seems less likely. Like really it's like

There's a continuum between what is a traditional PC, which is modular, where you can replace components in it, and you can run Windows or Linux or anything else on there. You can try to game on FreeBSD if you're an insane person. And then a console, which is Totally integrated, a single board design, lockdown operating system can only run what they sanctify, right? So where where on that continuum is this box going to land is my

burning question about what this thing's gonna be. Well and they don't really talk about that at all. Not really. I mean they they they get into some hardware details here. So like they they've said in the past, like AMD had already confirmed this as well and This will be the third Xbox in a row to use an AMD SOC. So when they say we're doing a next gen AMD SOC, you're like, duh. Yeah. But They do drop the word FSR next in here.

Which is I think the first time I've heard that term. Like FSR four is the current one on PC, right? Yeah, that's correct. So and that's only on RDNA four and newer. It's not on RDNA three stuff, which means the old Xbox, the Steam Deck, all that is not. Um, I'm not in I'm not up on the AMD roadmap enough to know exactly what is likely to be on this SOC in terms of our DNA or is is U DNA still a thing, or did they push back or abandon that?

Maybe U DNA was never a thing, Brad. It's unclear. U DNA seems like somebody was talking about something and then maybe uh they shouldn't have. Maybe the rubber met the road and they're like, Oh, we're gonna stick with the paradigm that we have. Well and f and for folks who don't know, R DNA is the consumer graphics architecture.

Uh C DNA is like the data center graphics architecture. Right. They they use different microcode so that if you want to run programs on if you want to run like a GPU compute thing. on the data center, you compile it differently than you would if you were running it on consumer graphics. And it's and it's like it's honestly it's been a problem for AMD. when you look at things like Strix Halo, because they had opportunities to to do the like

They they're missing out on the opportunity that NVIDIA has because all of the NVIDIA stuff just runs on CUDA. Right. Right. Right. So so RDNA four on the PC is is I think we've talked about this before, but that's that's the architecture that where AMD

more or less started catching up with baseline parity with NVIDIA in terms of ray tracing and machine learning and that sort of thing, right? Yeah, it's uh it's so pr on previous versions of AMD architectures, they You basically stole c general purpose compute shader time to do ray tracing math and and GPU compute math.

Um uh the the RDNA four stuff has tensor core equivalents and ray tracing acceleration in hardware. So I I wonder if this AMD chip and this next Xbox is going to be RDNA four or four point. Yeah. Because I I want to say the PS five Pro was like a subset of R DNA four. I think it was like Some of the features, but not all, if I'm not mistaken.

Yeah, they have the dedicated our uh ray tracing acceleration and some some tensor cores, but I believe it's not as fully featured as even like the current gen GPUs. Yeah. I mean I I think we can assume PS six and Helix are both gonna be substantially beyond a PS five pro.

Yeah, g given the timing here, so they talk about um shipping alpha versions of hardware beginning in twenty twenty seven. Yeah. Which to me says it's gonna be it R DNA I would be surprised if that means that the shipping hardware is RDNA four. I would assume it's the next generation beyond that. I think I would agree. Although like consoles generally have lagged a little bit. Like the I'm I think the current consoles are sort of our DNA two.

The two point five, like, yeah, I think the Series X is a little more powerful, might have some newer features. I think that's right. I'd I this is this is five year old information now, but No, no I think I think you're right,'cause it's the Steam Deck has two is two as well. And the whole point was, hey, we want to be able to run console games at the resolution that's shipped. Um So, yeah, I mean...

To me, if they're shipping alpha hardware next year, then that means we're not gonna see anything until twenty twenty eight, probably. Maybe. It depends on when. Like if they're if they're early next year, I think they still could hit an end of next year launch because there's definitely precedent for final dev kits going out within like six eight months of the console launch. In fact I th in my experience, that's how it usually works.

Like oh, that's true. This is going way back, but I can tell you even going back to like the three sixty launch, I remember going to Sega to preview full auto. Uh, which was the first three sixty game any of us had seen running and played in person. And that was still that was the year of launch. That was still running on one of the giant fuck off huge The G fives. Like giant, yeah, giant full size computer dev kits because they didn't have final three sixty

dev hardware to run it on yet. So like wait, was there something before it was in the dual G fives? I don't remember.'Cause the w it might have been under a blanket. It might have been under a sheet, to be honest. They might not have actually let us see the entire box uncovered. The earliest Xbox 360 dev kit I saw was a dual Power Mac G5.

And that's because it was a risk processor. They needed risk processors. Yeah. So so I any anyway, l long story short, I I think that I mean I think the original roadmap before this insane supply crisis hit was saying late twenty seven for both new consoles. Yeah. Um, we'll we'll see. I mean I I I think it is possible that hardware could go out next year and still see the console launch by the end of the year, but Except that's true. Again, this this is like

This is heavy on like kind of massaged marketing speech and light on actual numbers. They do say order of magnitude in ray tracing increase. Or increase in ray tracing performance. That's easy given how in unusable the ray tracing is in current gen consoles. Yeah. It it's like almost non existent. So that's although it's like decent in the PS five pro actually.

Yeah, but I don't think it's a good idea. Not really. I'm just saying that's a more recent example in consoles of actual functional ray tracing. But um I mean that you know, th you're not wrong. That's a low bar, but that still does seem somewhat substantial. I mean...

So the the the current the ray tracing in current hardware is good at the base level. Like we're not seeing full path tracing and anything on an original Series X or original PS five. Not even on the Pro. Like I'm playing Resident Evil Requiem on a PS five Pro right now and it's got decent race racing, but it's nowhere near path tracing or full Yeah, the digital foundry thing said that the PS five pro was somewhere between the ray tracing high and ray tracing

Uh the default ray tracing on the on the PC version. Yeah. I mean the game looks very good to be clear, but I'm sure I'd I would like to see the PC version path traced at some point. Well, I could make that happen for you. All right. Um I I can't I just can't play the game'cause it's too scary for me. I'm a giant coward, it turns out. It's you know, it's up there.

I don't I don't like I don't like scare game spread. Anyway, um Th a couple other quotes here. Yeah. They they say that the the So C quote integrates intelligence directly into the graphics and compute pipeline.

I think we can probably thank God tease out pretty clearly what they mean by that. I think they mean do you think they mean natural intelligence or some sort of artificial intelligence? No, no, I think probably like if like what if a what if a computer were to be able to learn to do things? Like turn one pixel into four? Something like that. Yeah. What if it could turn one frame into two or possibly three even? Yeah.

I I I like this I assume this means this will be heavily reliant on both upscaling and frame generation. I think any time you're talking about heavy duty ray tracing, you're you're gonna assume that. Uh although th I it's probably beyond the scope of this episode, but I there's some Direct X news that has come out of um GDC about uh

like linear algebra support and shader programs effectively. Like I'm I'm I'm way out over my skis on this stuff, but like it kinda sounded to me like what the um news around the fifty cards was when those were announced. Remember Remember all the direct integration of machine learning with like shader programs and stuff that they

Talked about with the fifty cards. Yeah. Uh like kind of like AI driven texture compression and stuff like that. I don't know if this is the same type of deal or not. It would make sense.

The AMD is following in that direction. You just come out of the evolving DirectX for the machine learning era on Windows, uh yeah. Yeah, I believe we're talking about the same thing here. This is on the Windows developer blog evolving DirectX for the ML era. Like the yeah, there's there's talk about, you know. Starting with linear algebra support in HLSL, which I think is what high level shader language

Yes, that is exactly. Right, right, as opposed to like some vendor specific stuff. But like that, you know, to unlock hardware accelerated NL operations directly in shaders sounds like A lot like the stuff NVIDIA was talking about last year with the fifty launch.

Yeah, this is wild stuff. I gotta read more about this before I want to talk about it. But Yeah, we're we're probably way out over our skis on this stuff. But the the point I'm making though is when they when they when they drop the vague marketing language in their in the Xbox wire.

post about uh how did they phrase it exactly? Intelligence integrates intelligence directly into the graphics and compute pipeline. Like that probably does mean more than just frame gen and upscaling. Like that's it's probably much more granular

Well programmatic stuff like what we're talking about with this direct X thing. I mean, I think that there's there's frame gen upscaling. I think ray reconstruction is important and denoising are all places that you'll see machine learning applied that uh to me feel inoffensive.

Uh honestly, the thing I'm most excited about in this whole in this whole Microsoft Hey, here's what we're talking about at G D C is advanced shader delivery on Windows because like We've seen that on Steam does that for the Steam Deck, where you where when you play a Steam Deck a game on the Steam Deck, they just dole the shader, the compiled already compiled shaders for whatever game you're playing out.

into the appropriate place. And it's awesome. Uh Intel GPUs do that now too for games that they pre-compile shaders on.

So like if you have an ARC GPU and you wanna play a game, you don't have to sit through the shader compilation step anymore if you have the right software installed? I've I've kinda wondered for a long time why this isn't done more broadly? I mean, okay, what are the variables in shader compilation? The game you're running, the graphics API slash driver version, and the GPU type. Are there any others that

I think that's well it's which version of the GPU you have too. Oh, in tur you mean like in terms of like like transparent revisions of the same GPU? Yeah, or no, um like it like the it's different GPU dies for like a fifty, seventy Oh you mean uh up and down the stack, yeah. Up and down the stack. Yeah, that's what that's what I mean. That's what I mean. Which which I mean, I mean literally which specific GPU, but it's just those three things, right?

I believe so, yeah. So that makes me w I've I've always wondered like what is the actual compatibility matrix. Like there's probably

A few dozen GPUs per company that are supported at any given time or is it more than that? But there's a lot of drivers. And there's a lot of way more than a few dozen GPUs. Like NVIDIA, if you think about across mobile and desktop and the fifty seven seventy and the fifty seventy seventy TI and the fifty forty eighty super and like th like there's there's I don't know, probably ninety or a hundred GPUs across I I guess I bet I bet when you start factoring mobile like laptop

tier GPUs in that number that number actually goes up pretty fast. And driver revisions. Especially'cause I bet there are driver revs that don't make it out to the public that they'd still have to worry about that hundred percent. Probably getting distributed by like Dell or something like that. So like

Okay, fair. At some point at some point managing builds for every single set of shaders across all those combinations probably is prohibitive. When Intel told us about this, I it the first thought I had was, Oh yeah, this is something you can do'cause you only have four GPUs. Right.

Well it totally makes sense for these integrated like Xbox handhelds and this and what Helix is gonna be, if assuming it's PC enough that'cause you know, consoles have the same requirement, it's just that they're a single target. So like that's just the shaders are just packaged in with the game and nobody notices. Well it was easy for Steam Deck because similar situation, right? It's a sing it like they they just respin the shader compilation on every time the driver updates.

Yeah. Um but doing it on Windows is exciting and I'm I'm can't wait to hear more. Yeah. So but again, I wonder if that extends beyond these kind of integrated Xbox slash PC devices to like actual computers? This this on PCs? I don't know. This says that they're doing it on Windows through the Xbox app and that you c a developer can package them

for submission through the Xbox app and delivery across. So interesting. Yeah, that's cool. That's that's fabulous. I'm excited about it. I hesitate to even bring this up because I barely know what I what I'm talking about here, but I there was a reset error thread on another GDC talk. Or announcement like r as we were setting up to record, like 10 minutes before we started, about some new NVIDIA Microsoft initiative they've launched just now that's

is also aimed at eliminating shader stutter, but it seems to be some kind of insane compile time optimization. It's not about distributing pre-computed shaders ready to go. Like looking at the slides that they had there, like it seems to be some kind of like crazy optimization for The current paradigm, which is building the shaders as they are required in the game at runtime, right? Except not in a way that hitches your performance like

I don't know what kind of crazy stuff is going on with that. But yeah, if if if you don't know about this, uh Digital Foundry has done a whole bunch of good work on this in a bunch of games over the last couple of years. And the thing that they've found in is that even in games where you pre compile shaders when you launch

There's a lot of games that either miss miss stuff to be during that pre compiling phase or it comes up later. And then when when the game when the game loop pauses to compile that shader, it causes uh hitching micro stutter, uh, which is incredibly apparent to players and um

Like people are taking it serious. It's funny,'cause NVIDIA's been talking about this for about ten years now. I remember the first when when they first rolled out G Sync, one of the they were talking about frame pacing and getting micro microstutter can under control. And uh it's just now kind of the rest of the industry's waking up to it and and uh I'm excited to see that people Yeah. It's nice that people care. Yeah. That's like important progress. Any anyway, like

That's most of the there's one more detail about not just about Helix, but about where Micr Microsoft and Xbox game compatibility is going, but before we get to that, like I'll just I'll just throw the question out again.

What is that box? Like it's still internally it's still gonna look like a console, right? Like it's it's gonna look like a steam machine. It's well, inside though, it's still gonna be a single board design, it's still gonna have solder on memory hooked directly to a single SOC, right? Like there's not gonna be anything

Can you could you see anything user replaceable in that thing? The storage. You think you think they will at least let you do that? I mean, I think I look at the A that the the distance the the change in quality of SSDs from the Xbox series launch to now. Is is pretty good. Like if you look at my like Sony's support for third party SSDs on the PS5 has been, I think, a pretty unequivocal success.

Right. Like there's a cut there's a handful of SKUs that the message boards tell you not to buy, but generally speaking, you plug an SSD in there and it just kind of works. Right. Um, I feel like If Microsoft doesn't do that, if they do the thing that they did with the current gen, which is

What what you have they they do they sell like a module or something you can add in? Is that how it works? It's a proprietary storage car. There's a couple of them now. The first the launch one was made by Seagate and then at some point Western Digital rolled out a cheaper option, but they're still proprietary in terms of physical form factor. I think under the hood they are using some standard

storage bus or something, but yeah. But you do have to buy the like branded Xbox storage cards still. I I would hope that they ditch that in favor of something that's more off the shelf, but maybe they won't. Who knows? Like like my big question is just like, you know, you you crack open a console right now It's w it's one motherboard, there's one SOC that's got CPU and GPU on it. Like crucially there is one shared pool of memory. Mm-hmm. Which That's gonna be the same.

Right. That okay, that's what I'm getting at. I mean that's that's the way the Steam Deck works. That's the way Na that's the way the Steam Machine is gonna be too. Yeah, so I I guess all of this is kind of a solved problem already. Yeah, they're they're all strict salos. That's that's I mean, and who knows, that might be that that I joke, but I mean Strix Halo is R DNA three five, which is a weird choice, I think probably just due to the timing on those products.

But I I wouldn't surprise me if the eventual hardware is something that looks like a strict halo with a great big pool of memory that's shared between GPU and CPU across the single APU. That that's kind of what I was getting at here is is like hardware wise on the inside, this is going to look just like a traditional console. The difference is going to be in the software implementation and what they let you run on it, right?

Yeah, for me for me the win I mean, there's a whole spectrum, right? There's a whole weird there's a whole weird spectrum of Like you you alluded to this beginning. In the beginning there was a console and there was a PC and there was a big gulf in between them. And now we increasingly are seeing PCs that are kind of console-y, and we see consoles that are kind of PC. Yeah. And like

Who who knows? Like are they gonna let you jailbreak this and put wind like normal ass windows on it? Or Linux? Or oh well that's this is two questions. A can you jailbreak it and put Linux on it? Or do you even have to jailbreak it to put Linux on it? Yeah. B Is it gonna run normal ass Windows? Like is it gonna have the drop to a Windows desktop option like a Steam Deck does for a Linux desktop? Like is it is it gonna be full Windows under the hood?

Or is it gonna be a stripped down Windows that's like, you know, lacking certain backwards compell you know, like I mentioned earlier, maybe maybe it doesn't run. Thirty five years of Windows software necessarily. Who knows? When when you pair that with the Xbox mode stuff that they did with the Rog R O G Al I X, the the Xbox edition one. Yeah, which that that's coming to Windows Desktop next month, by the way, is one of the other bullet points here.

Yeah, and for folks who don't know about that, it was basically it's basically the Xbox app you can set it to launch and go full screen and it Makes your your Windows handheld a little bit more like a console. It it's basically Steam big picture, but for Windows slash Xbox, right? Yeah, and they do they do turn some stuff off in the background so it's uh uses a little less memory than like a normal Windows install with just the big window the big Xbox app does.

Um, it was the reaction to it amongst like Adam Patrick Murray over the full nerd spent a lot of time with it and people who review that kind of stuff w it was pretty tepid at best. Yeah, I remember that. Um it's it's It's interesting though'cause It does point to a future where Windows is just where where the OS is just a thing that runs the software and the software is either Windows or Xbox. And and and that to me is is kind of interesting. I I don't know.

I I don't know that Microsoft is able to make a good OS anymore. Maybe not. I don't feel super optimistic about that. Yeah. Seems possible.

Um they also seems probable. Seems like maybe we're seeing that borne out day by day. Yeah, they they also talked about um cross cross compatibility for applications. Yeah, there's I guess I guess there's going to be a new a new version of the G DK that

Supposed to make it easy to spin up builds for Windows next Xbox and current slash previous Xbox, meaning series X and S, like kind of And I I guess this I'm I'm coming to realise as I'm talking to you and hearing about the handhelds that are out there and stuff that like

Some of the differences under the hood, like the memory architecture differences in terms of, you know, on a PC, you've got system memory and graphics memory, and those are separate and communicate over a pretty slow bus versus the one pool of faster memory on It sounds to me like the at the software at the game development level, those differences are being abstracted away already, or already have been, in a way that like maybe it is much easier to just

spit out builds of I'm not saying it's one button, but maybe it is easier to spit out builds for PC and Xbox. I I think I think so I think there's two things happening. R one is that the people who work at the bleeding edge of what's capable with what's possible with graphics. are paying attention to that stuff in a way that they always have, right? Yeah. Okay. That that that's my that okay, that that was my assumption. That especially like

Y like your naughty dogs or whatever, you know, like they're squeezing every bit of performance out of Yeah the platform that they can based on those efficiencies that aren't there on a PC. But maybe at the maybe like the smaller team on a Unity or a Unreal Five project.

having to spend less time thinking about those architectural differences and the engine just kinda handles it and the SDK? Yeah, it it's like anything. If you have if you have three hundred people if you're bungee and you have three hundred people working on marathon, right? And Uh, you have a 30 person graphics team, you're gonna spend more time your 30 person graphics team is gonna spend a lot more time thinking about that.

than if you're a thirty person studio and you have one guy whose job it is to do graphic stuff. Right. Right. And at that point you're probably, I assume to a large degree, just relying on the tremendous amount of brute force compute that exists now compared to in the past. Well and and the work that Epic or you know whoever provides your engine is doing, right? Like that's like you you're you're saying, okay

We're going to what what what can we do that's gonna make our game stand out? Is is what if you're a thirty person team, that's what that's where you're at. Just just to be clear, a thirty person team is like at this point is a pretty big indie game. Like it's it's not quite a triple A game. It's a big giant indie game. Um so like you're you're talking about like a double fine or um

Uh yes, z d Doublefind often has twent twenty to thirty person teams these days is is a good example, I think. Yeah. Um so so yeah, like this is a weird announcement to me, because like setting up a bunch of different SDKs and a bunch of different pipelines through the game. is ki is difficult once, but it's not like an ongoing difficult, expensive cost.

Like you you don't that stuff doesn't get touched it gets touched a lot early and it gets touched a lot during late optimization, but not really kind of in between. The things that are time consuming are like if you're testing and you want to do testing every day, having to build five versions of the game for Xbox series and Windows and X uh Project Helix and uh uh epic game store and steam is is like time consuming and it and actually it has actually expensive costs because it means that you're

Like the the cl fastest time you can go from trying putting something into testing it is is, you know, many hours in some cases. Um And it also increases your testing service. Like if they really wanted to do something awesome here, they would the it would be the same binary on all these devices. And that means you only have to test that binary one place. You can you can test in each of the places, you make the binary once and it's and you're done.

Um and I don't I haven't seen anybody talking about this. I didn't go to this session, unfortunately. The line was really, really long and I think I had to be someplace else. Um but uh but yeah, so I don't know, we'll see more more stuff will come out. They usually publish their white papers about what's coming on the platforms the week uh the like the next week or the week after. Oh.

So the it'll be on the dev centers and we'll be able to find out what the actual meat and potatoes of this is. Yeah, the the technical implementation and and what that means you can do with the machine is is going to be super interesting. Here's here's the last quick bullet point that is kind of tucked at the bottom of that Xbox wirepost.

We're committed to keeping games from four generations of Xbox playable for years to come. As part of our twenty-fifth anniversary later this year, we'll be rolling out new ways to play some of the most iconic games from our past. So that's three sixty, Xbox One series, and Xbox Next.

You mean the four generations? That's the four generations. Well, X no original Xbox. That's what I think Fusion Frenzy can get fucked. Ah well, but those games are already backwards compatible. A ton of a ton of OG Xbox games run on a Series X. Uh really? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. That was a a big part of their I mean it's well, I don't know about a ton, but it's probably a few dozen. Maybe that's generous, but it's definitely like your ninja guidance and um झाश्ष।

Atogi, uh there are definitely Xbox games, original Xbox games that run on Series X like nicely at four K. Oh, weird. Yeah, it's not a ton. Not as many as three sixty, but Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um Yeah, I mean, look at the Xbox One generation was kind of a small Yeah. It was a small generation too, right? Yeah. I mean, plenty most of those games run on a Series X, but

Really what I'm asking here is like what what new ways to play those games are they talking about? Does that mean Xbox games on PC? Is that where this is going? Because if they're think so. Well, but if they're if they're going to if if the next Xbox effectively is a PC or running Windows And it's going to run those old Xbox games in backwards compatibility mode. They're kind of already having to port the Xbox compatibility layer to PC de facto.

So bringing those games is brute force backwards compatible? Can we finally play brute force on a PC? I don't know. Anyway, like like Are we going to see all the four generations of Xbox games playable on Windows finally, maybe? Oh see, I I read that to mean four generations of Xbox games starting with the three sixty and going forward, not

No, I because again I I guess they do talk about backwards compatibility there, so you're probably right. In fact, I think I did an interview with Jason Ronald about backwards compatibility like four years ago, like right at the beginning of Next Blender or something. But but my understanding for the little bit I understand

Their their whole compatibility like VM layer to run old Xbox games is fascinating. But I think those games are all running in the same type of virtualization. Like I think it's fairly trivial since they already have original Xbox and three sixty games running in the same basic backwards compatibility framework.

I think it's pretty trivial to bring all those over. I mean Yeah, they're all X eighty six except for the three sixty. Like like they're you know, they're all I think being kind of like machine language translated and blah blah blah, recon you know, just in time recompiled or something like that, but Wild. My my guess is this means maybe those games finally show up on PC, but I really don't know.

I would like that. I mean I I I'm not against that. I think it's good, you know, be it's nice to be able to play old games. Yes, I agree. Especially'cause original Xbox emulation is still like very, very limited is my understanding. I don't keep up with it too closely. But Yeah, I haven't looked at it in a long time'cause

I don't I honestly don't know what I would play from the original Xboxes. Maybe Brute Force is probably it. Maybe maybe it's gotten better, I don't know, but for a while it seemed like three sixty emulation was in a better state than original Xbox.

Ma that would make sense. Uh due to like lack of documentation stuff. Anyway, all right, real quick, the the PlayStation 5 Pro news, pretty minor in light of you know, full on next Xbox, but um they've rolled out a second version of PSSR on the PS5 Pro. This is their upscaling. Yeah, this is this is their PlayStation spectral super resolution, I believe is what it stands for. It's a souped up it's like a superset of FSR, right? So I think it debuted before FSR four on PC.

But now they are saying this second version is downstream of S F SR F FSR four's launch. That also makes sense. Quote, with a further six months of refinement is how they describe it. I wonder who's doing the training here. Cause Sony is the one player that doesn't have a big giant compute cloud to do like m model training on. Yeah, this this blog post that Sony put up is written by Mark Cerny and it it says, you know, the new PSSR stems from our project amethyst partnership with AMD.

So I don't know if maybe that means in that partnership AMD is bearing a lot of the workload of the training on basic. Or or who knows, maybe there's some co investment or something. I mean it it could be that Sony's chucking a little cheddar in to A and B for the for the power bill.

And the rising tide lifts all ships. Right. Yeah. And and again they they do say this is downstream of FSR four, so some of that work has already been done. Anyway, it's better upscaling. Like it is but That's meaningful because a decent number of PS5 Pro games have gotten dinged for by like the dig digital foundries of the world for having pretty rotten looking image quality on some of their upscaling. Like Silent Hill F is is an example of one that has some like pretty obvious artifacts.

Like bad ghosting and stuff. Yeah, like it handles grass poorly and stuff like that. I think I wanna say Star Wars Outlaws might have been another one at launch that did not look great. So so here's the interesting this is this is the part that actually made me bring this up'cause Better upscaling, kind of whatever. But They say a bunch of those games that have come out since launch will be getting manual updates to enable this better version.

But they're also putting a system level toggle in to let you force on the new version in older games that do not get updates. Oh, so it's all the good stuff of PC gaming coming into the consoles now. So yes, it's a little dodgy, and in fact their screenshot is is this I don't know that I can enlarge this enough to read the tiny text of the system dialogue that they posted. But I guess I'm of two minds about it, but I kind of appreciate this about Sony. They have always been like this.

Where when they roll out a feature like this that could be forced on in older games but it might cause problems, they just go ahead and let you do it with a tiny little disclaimer that says, disable this if you have problems. Which again I'm squinting at this system dialogue. It says use an upgraded PSSR PlayStation spectral super resolution model to improve image quality in some supported games.

Turn this off if you experience unexpected behavior during gameplay. That's the line. It's always been. Turn this off if you experience unexpected behavior. Because they did the same thing with um When the PS five Pro came out or sorry, PS four pro came out. Yeah, I remember this. It it ran at higher clocks than the base PS four and they would let you turn that on for unsupported games that hadn't been patched to support it.

With the exact same disclaimer. Just hey, turn this off if it causes problems. You can do the same thing on a PS5 with HDR. You can try to force HDR on in games that don't support it. Seems like a bad idea, Brad. Maybe. I mean it definitely goes against the console ethos of like everything is tested to work properly and is a guaranteed experience, right? I don't I don't think that's been the ethos for a while, man. On the other hand, like

Guaranteed some of these older games. Like, I don't know. Like, I'm still playing through. For the fifth time, Silent Hill F. It's a long story. Wow. It's a game it is a game that is designed to be played several times to get the full story. Like it changes pretty significantly from learning. Um, yes. Or a visual novel like, I guess. Okay. As I've kinda come to understand, but

That's a game that I actually wouldn't be super shocked if they don't update it with this new PSSR. So I appreciate I appreciate having the problem tr or sorry, not the problem, the possibility of forcing it on in that game even if It's not supported. I will say one of the things they talked about with the DLSS uh update that we'll talk about in a minute is r like m updating the models so there's less ghosting in specific places. And like

I don't see that ghosting very much anymore. It used to be, especially in the old days of DLSS two, it was pretty common. Uh and these days it's much, much less of an issue. But when it does pop up, you you don't want to see it. And I I would hate to be stuck in a situation where I couldn't turn it off on a console. Yeah. Um but also

It's funny, I realize now when these new consoles come out, everything's gonna have some sort of AI upscaling. It's like the Switch two has AI upscaling, the PS five pro, yep. Presumably the next generations of both the Xbox and the PlayStation will like I like.

I made this point on the Next Langer podcast this week. It's been it's been interesting seeing two parallel lines of thought out there on social media, one of which is, Man, Resident Evil Requiem for a Switch 2 game looks amazing. Like it's

Obviously not as good as the PC or the bigger console versions, but it's like shocking how good it looks for a tiny little tablet thing. Mm-hmm. But then there's also the like justifiable or understandable sentiment that why do we need new consoles like these current consoles? Feel like they've barely been put to use, which is true. Like I get it. Like there have been a lot of disruptions in the last five years.

that have made it feel like these g these consoles have not really gotten their due in terms of being fully utilized. All that said though Like what are the things on the Switch two that the Switch two is benefiting from that these consoles missed the boat on by like a year? Yeah, I was gonna say the it's ray tracing and ups and and machine learning upscaling stuff. Like the like those are the reasons The switch two is able to turn these types of

uh results out. Th these these consoles were like a year early for some real good business days. Like like not not just it not your typical iterative raster improvements in the way things work, which we had seen for the twenty years before that. I guess that G Force Three episode last week was kind of well timed, right?'Cause like not a whole lot had changed in the way games

were rendered for fifteen years or something, right? I mean almost twenty and then but then these technologies are like significant departures from how things have been done in the past and the and the current consoles just barely missed that.

The only big jump between the G Force three and ray tracing was when they when they stopped uh when every vendor stopped having their own shader language variant. Yeah. Sure. And like that was but that was an iterative kind of invisible change to users.

Like there's some just some direct exchanges. I mean there's some other stuff like physically based rendering and and like s early attempts at global elimination and stuff like that, but those are still pretty iterative features, right? Like it's still Yeah, and the physicality based rendering stuff is still pretty th like it's a it's It's it's not a universal soup to nuts across the entire industry thing. It's a it's a like the right choice for some games and not the right for others. Right.

I anyway, all all I'm saying is that like like yes, it's gonna be a bitter pill to see m newer, more expensive boxes come out not that long from now when The current ones still feel like they have untapped potential, but also like th there are gonna be like pretty significant improvements in those things that

the rest of the games industry has just been kind of taking for granted for years now. Well so it's it's funny. I spent a bunch of time with Re with Resident Evil Requiem this last week, I guess. And um I was kind of taken by how good the high rate tracing, but not path trace. uh version looked and ran on a fifth like I got an entirely playable sixty plus frames a second on that high ray tracing setting without upscaling, without frame generating of that stuff with Requiem at four K.

And then when I flipped path tracing on again without the upscaling, without the without the frame gen, I was getting it like I was getting what I think of as like Xbox 360 era console performance, right? It was like Thirty frames per second, pretty reliably at four K. Native four K? That's yeah, native four K, no upscaling, no frame gen. And like

That's pretty incredible given the the kind of math that's happening in in that game at that at those scenes. Yeah. But at the same time, it didn't look enough better over the ray tracing high preset, which only does like ray tracing for reflex engines, shadows, and stuff like that, that I was gonna give up sixty, yeah, fifty, fifty or sixty frames a second.

So uh anyway, it's it's we're in we're in for a weird time. I'm wildly curious to see how consoles handle like real ray tracing and Like, are they gonna start releasing path traced games for the Xbox and let people choose whether they want decent shadows and decent reflections or like fully modeled lighting and like it's gonna be a wild time. I mean it's gonna be interesting once every current platform has caught up on these technologies and has

very competent baseline implementations of them'cause the Switch already does. Like the Switch two has the stuff already. So but like consoles still largely dictate where development goes, right? Like you're only set the baseline, I think. Right. Like you're only going to do so much to a PC port when Unless somebody writes a check. Sure. Yeah. But anyway, it it's it's gonna be but but but You know, supply costs.

cost of living, like everything is like who knows when those consoles are even gonna launch and how many people are gonna be able to afford them. So like will games even get made for them? Are we gonna be looking at three years or four years of cross gen development? Who knows? Like it's all gonna be so bumpy. It wouldn't surprise me if split dev ends up being the watchword for most mass market titles that aren't first party exclusives. Yeah.

Yeah. Um say speaking of first party exclusives, we don't have this on the list, but there was a rumor last week that Sony's backing down from PC. Yes. Did anything come out officially one way or the other on that, or is it still just like

I can't imagine they will ever address that. You'll just see it in the it reflected in the release calendar. Yeah. But it's certainly it's certainly not something for them them to celebrate if that's the way they're going, or that's not something that's going to go over well, so they will just quietly stop announcing PC ports. Um interesting times out there. Um should we just wrap up on the DLSS four point five since we were talking about it? Yeah.

Doesn't sound like a ton new with that, but there's one big thing. Well they had they had a lot of they had a lot of um interesting they had a lot of design wins is I think what I'd call'em. So they showed like Uh the the James Bond game that Io is making is gonna have full path tracing. Um uh they talked about the mega geometry support that originally rolled out in Alan Wake is coming to some other games. I think most notably control resonant. Um and th and those are like

Those are things that make ray tracing performant in types of uh areas that typically ray tracing wouldn't be performant in, that mega geometry thing. It like reduces basically groups up triangles together or something so that so that like you can do fewer math calculations on ray tracing in like really complicated scenes like forests and stuff like that.

Uh the the thing that I think was the big win that was kind of quiet and people didn't get super excited about is that DLSS four point five allows you to set a frame gen target frame rate.

So you say, Oh, I want to run at my monitor's refresh rate and I want you to generate frames to get to that point, but not It'cause'cause currently on frame gen, if you would do 2x, every other frame is generated, whether that takes you to your monitor's frame rate or ninety frames a second or you know two times your monitor's frame rate. Um and and this uh w with the addition of six X frame gen frame rates for uh the current the the DLSS four point five.

I I really think that the hey, just set it to my monitor's frame rate is a is a is the thing that we should have had from the beginning on this. Yeah, that was my first reaction to this was why wasn't it this way from the beginning? I I certainly don't know, but it seems like having a more deterministic target

might help for optimizing for latency or consistency in in performance? It turns out like This topic is practically cractally complicated. Like I I shouldn't even try to comment on it because it's way beyond me. Um it it's the It has to do like there's a a million places that the c that the frame timing can go wrong.

uh starting at the beginning of the graphics pipeline when you're when you're playing the game and the game freezes while a shader compiles, all the way up to the connection between the monitor's frame buffer and the display gets overwhelmed and frames come in faster for a second for a for a millisecond and slower for a millisecond. And anywhere along that way your your experience can be bad.

Um, if you have everything best case, then yeah, it seems It seems like this is more what I would have wanted, which is Hey, if if the real frame is lagging here, it'll dump a a fa a a render a generated frame in. That makes that makes more sense to me just to get to a baseline a specific baseline frame rate. R rather than install. Yeah. Yeah. As opposed to just give me as many as you can.

It seems good. Um I'd like I in a perfect world I would still rather not deal with generated frames, but my gut feeling is they are just like frame gen is just gonna be a fact of life on the next consoles. I what I will say So like improvements are good in that technology because we're going to be living with it one way or another. I what I what I'll say is that I wasn't a huge I wasn't hugely bought into frame gen on the four series cards.

Uh and I'm generally I don't like it very much on the AMD cards with FSR four or on the on the Intel cards. Uh playing with the controller is fine. The the input latency of a controller And the kind of like lag, the lag that comes with the sticks is fine. Um, but like one of the things I always do when I would test frame, when I want to, when I'm at a demo and they're like, Hey, you want to see our frame gen? I'm like, Yeah, let me see it.

I grab the mouse and keyboard and I pick a spot on the monitor uh on the scene and I try to move my mouse and lock in directly to landing on that spot, which is something that with low latency you should be able to do. Like nine times out of ten if you play a lot of first person shooters with a mouse and keyboard.

And on the four ninety s four four series cards on NVIDIA and on all of the AMD and Intel implementations I've tested, it's it's hard to do that. It requires changing the way I my brain inter interprets mouse movement. To overcome the frame latency. On the DLSS4 implementation that shipped on the five series cards, I don't notice a difference. Interesting. Like like it's it's because they're doing it's because they take a moment right at the end of the pipeline and shift the rendered frame.

uh, you know, to match the mouse movement and then fill in the pixels the the the gaps with machine learn learning generated pixels. And it works really well. Now there's a little bit of artifacting sometimes. And I still don't ever turn it on for multiplayer games.

But like it on single player stuff it's pretty indistinguishable. So the concerning thing to me is that that's the state that's the NVIDIA state of the art, which AMD has not caught up to yet. So like what Frame gen capability are these consoles gonna launch with? I don't know. I are we gonna are we gonna be in a situation where like we're like one iteration of AMD's frame gen too early for it to be good for another seven years?

I think that they have the hardware in place to do the the do the same thing that anybody is doing right now. The software stack can evolve post launch, right? Yeah, and also on the gamepad I don't think the latency matters as much. Yeah. Um I I do I do think that a performance mode where everything's turned down like I I th the thing I fear is that the new normal for all consoles going forward is that you choose between performance and good looking mode.

And maybe the performance mode doesn't have the the generated frames because that adds a little bit of latency. Yeah, that would that would be unfortunate if all the performance options are frame gen next generation. Anyway, much to find out over the coming months and years.

Um okay, so let's talk uh last uh let's talk about Apple's new hardware. Yeah.'Cause this came I mean, this would been rumored for a while, I think. Yeah, th there was a lot of it, but there's only one actually new thing. I mean, they announced like M five Pro laptops, but that's that's just iterative basic I th I mean there's some interesting stuff with the way they're designing their SOCs now for those, but

I don't think we need they're they're d doing some vertical stacking of dies, which I didn't quite understand. But that's cool. I don't think we have to get into that here. But the but the MacBook Neo is the actual interesting new product line. Yeah, the the top line on that is that it's a six hundred dollar um uh MacBook, small MacBook running uh an A eighteen Pro, which is last year's iPhone Pro chip. Yeah.

Uh insane that we're at the point where a phone processor can now run a laptop, but I mean we've been trying it people have been trying it for more than a decade and it just has kind of always sucked. Fair

Um but it's a six core it's a six core part. It's two performance cores, four efficient cores. Did you I'm sorry, can I stop you really quick? I this this this cannot be relevant to the A18 Pro and the MacBook Dio because it is an existing chip from last year. Did you see what they've done to the core branding on the M five Pro and Max? No. The E cores are now P cores.

They now call their efficiency cores performance cores. And what do they call the performance cores? The performance cores are now super cores. What? Super cores and performance cores. Субтитры сделал DimaTorzok

Like are they using last gen is this like an Intel thing where they're using last gen performance cores as efficient cores? I I don't think so. I don't know or is this just marketing? I I th I m my guess because it's Apple is that it's just marketing. I mean I'm sure there there I'm sure there's some performance uplift and maybe there is some difference in kind rather than degree that allows them to justify this change.

I just think it's I just think it's a very funny apple-like thing to do. Like they're they're literally just saying like our our e-cores are better than your P cores. Okay. Anyway, go ahead. I have questions about naming that we're gonna talk about in a little bit, but uh it's eight the the the gotcha on this is that it's an eight gigabyte uh RAM config. So it's eight gigabytes of LPDDR5X RAM.

And two hundred and fifty six gigs of storage on on these models. Do they still s they do still sell an eight gigabyte air, right? I don't think they do currently. I think that the I think the last year's or year before's was the most recent eight gigabyte air. I will tell you my wife anecdotally has an an M one MacBook. From twenty twenty with eight gigabytes of RAM because I didn't want to spend the extra five hundred dollars, whatever it was, to get the sixteen gig model.

And Mac OS Like this is this is the benefit Apple has in today's current RAM constrained environment. Mac OS like Linux, pretty good on low RAM, it turns out. Yeah. Yeah. Although one of the ways they do that on the current MacBooks is that they page very aggressively to the SSD, which is so fast that it's an appreciable fraction of system memory speed at this point, which

Probably adds adds some weird to your SSDs though. It helps it helps with system responsiveness, but uh the little bit I've looked at it, it's certainly slowly uh eroding your your the right tolerance on your storage? So when those stories broke last year, I I went and looked at my wi the wear on my wife's laptop just to see.

And it turns out if you're mostly just using it to browse the web, you're probably fine. If you're doing heavier workloads, you probably want sixteen gigs of RAM. So so I just looked the current

Current MacBook Air, which is that a their M five, isn't it? Yes, it is an M five error that they've moved to and it it is baseline sixteen gigabytes now. Yeah, which is like I I I tested a Linux machine with sixteen gigs the other day and was fine. Um I think this is Like look, we're gonna see ads about Ram. I I don't think Apple's ever gonna do ads about RAM, but if they did, they would be ragging on Microsoft for the amount of RAM Windows uses these days. Sure. Yeah.

Okay, so it's five hundred and ninety-nine bucks. You can get if you have the if you have an e dot edu email address, then you can get it for five hundred dollars.

Which like this is okay, I know this is not in Chromebook price territory, but this is basically the closest they're ever gonna get to a Chromebook competitor, right? I mean that's kind of what this is, right? Well so We talked about this on the full nerd a little bit this week, but the fattest part of the PC market from what we could tell based on like traffic to laptop review pages on PC World's website.

Is that five hundred to six hundred dollar price tracing? So that that is definitely above the Chrome the Chromebooks or like two, three hundred, right? Well, they used to be. Oh, I guess everything is more now. Yeah. I mean you like you can get cro you can get expensive Chromebooks, but but like there is a there's definitely a bump at like two hundred and fifty it used to be two hundred and fifty to three hundred bucks, now it's probably three hundred and fifty to four hundred.

Um the the this is this is the hey, my kid needs a laptop for school, but it's I'm not buying him a gaming laptop price range, right? Uh and their marketing for it strongly implies that they're looking at M uh that they they real they they note they noted that there needed to be a

product between an iPad that you give a young kid and a MacBook that you give to somebody when they go to college. Sure. Um uh and and this seems to be filling that hole. It's a little bit smaller keyboard. I got to get hands on with one this week. Uh yeah, Roman brought their review sample by the full nerd and we talked about it at length. Um, his his testing seemed to indicate that the performance was really comparable to a twenty twenty

Era M M1 MacBook Air. Okay. It's worth mentioning that last Christmas. One of the biggest sellers in the laptop space was that six hundred dollar M one twenty twenty st like stripped down MacBook twenty twenty M one MacBook Air that Walmart was selling for six hundred or six hundred ninety-nine bucks. I remember that. Yeah. Um It's a little bit smaller keyboard, he said. Uh but it feels solid in a way that like laptops, PC Windows laptops in this price range do not feel.

Like it's still the unibody aluminum construction. The keyboard's really nice. The trackpad isn't the the haptic one. It's a regular physical trackpad with a click. Interesting. Um and it has a retina display that has some scree resolution. It was like 2076 by I don't know. It it it was a usable resolution. I I'm like I said I used it for a little bit. Also a range of fun colors. and a range of fun colors. And almost all of the marketing showed

young girls and teen teens using a laptop. Sure. So to me it said this says, Hey, we want to get the part of the market that doesn't care about video games. Yep. Yep. Um the the other gotcha is the USB ports. Because it's that's always Because it's an A eighteen and there's not a big USB bus on that thing, you get one USB C you get two USB C ports.

One of'em's USB three and one of'em's USB two. How well I mean, we can answer this'cause the units are out there, but how likely do you think it is that they label which is which? The front one's USB two and the back one's USB three. But do they make any other Nope. And I didn't think so. Uh by user aware. Yeah, it seems it's like I think uh the other thing is you can only hook one external monitor up to it.

Okay. Which kind of makes sense given the price range. It feels like an arbitrary, but whatever. Well, it probably just there's some some limitation on the display hardware, I'm sure. Yeah. To me

Like it this feels like a big deal in that Apple's never cared about this market before. Yeah. Um I mean it well, you know, but like the not on laptops, you're right. Like they've toyed with, you know, the iPhone SE has kind of like slowly trickled out or you know, just kinda been quietly hanging around in the background for a while and then now they're doing the E models on the phones, which

are not as discounted as I would like, but there is at least a cheaper phone option. Like th they seem to have been forced, kicking and screaming, to admit that there is a big market for lower price stuff. Yeah, to to me this to me, I I'm not sure if this is, hey, there's a hole in our market and we're losing customers to it. Um, which is which is kind of like

You know, y you like I said, young kids are uh a lot of them have iPads. Yeah, it's more about market growth, probably, right? Or it's more if it's an untapped price segment that they would like to expand into. That's my assumption. Also, I think they probably have an advantage over comparable Windows vendors in that

I don't think you can ship an eight gig Windows laptop without people going ballistic. Probably not. Um like there are I mean, we just described one with the memory management and the storage, but like there are there are profound advantages to vertically controlling the entire hardware and software stack. Oh, a hundred percent.

Um, I uh I really personally like I want this exact thing, except for I want an iPad that runs Mac OS and can also run iPad apps and use the touch interface. I was when they announced the very first iPad, I was convinced that's where things were going. And they never actually got there. I I mean, this gives me hope because like I look at I look at that, like we're literally in this situation. My daughter's using an old hand me down Windows laptop.

At some but her iPad is is pandemic era and she's outgrown it, right? Like she needs she does a lot of artwork and I want to be able to get her something that she has pencil support on. And also but also I don't want her to have four laptop sized computers that she has to keep up with.

But like when she's tried to use my iPad for school stuff, it just doesn't like the browser's not sufficient. It always has problems. Yeah. I mean, it's a shame because the current iPad Pro hardware is clearly capable enough to run actual Mac OS. I mean, here here we have a freaking phone processor doing it.

Yeah. They just they just don't want to do that because presumably they would love to sell you both an iPad and a MacBook. Look, I would happily pay the price of an iPad and a MacBook that's just Just a that does both. I I I I mean, arguably it when you buy an iPad Pro and a keyboard, you're paying the price of an iPad and a MacBook now. Yep. Uh anyway. Yeah. Uh can can I can I

Yes. I have one what's the term bugaboo. There's one little thing about MacBooks that have been bugging me. I love my m my M one Pro. What's the deal with MacBooks? Like I I this is the best laptop I've ever used by a lot. Like it's it's crazy how good they are. So you have an error in the house, so I guess you know what I'm talking about here. I really hate the hard edge on the um

the like the the aluminum body to slice cheese with where where you rest your wrists. Mm-hmm. Like Apple has got the best Apple introduced me to the term chamfering. Yep. Like Apple has the best Automatic lathes or whatever the fuck, industrial machinery for shaving. For you know the types of machinery that shave aluminum into specific shapes. They c they could put just the slightest rounding on that edge on the laptop, and it would feel so much more comfortable to lay your

wrists on. But then the but the top wouldn't line up with the bottom. That's why they did but but they could that's why they could they could make it the m the most like the very shallowest angle of rounding on that edge possible. And it would still look fine when it was closed and also not Slice your forearms open? Yeah, it's still the it's still the sharp edges on this one, unfortunately. Aesthetics over Usability in some spots. They're all about form over function. Yeah. I don't know. I know.

So the one thing I wondered is this naming thing is new, right? Neo's a new name for Apple. Yeah, and I don't know that like I mean, obviously you know, Neo literally means new, but I don't know that it communicates

what they're trying to communicate. Well so like I'm not sure where they're going with this name'cause it doesn't s when you hear it it doesn't necessarily scream. Like it could mean anything in terms of like how powerful it is, is the thing. Like it doesn't communicate pricing and and capability.

So I wonder if they have if they think that the mini, the iPhone minis didn't sell because they were called minis and nobody wants the small one for babies. Wait, hang on. You're not saying there's gonna be an iPhone Neo, are you? That's my that's my theory. Really?

I bet that they bring back the mini as a Neo. Interesting. That would make a lot of people happy. They're like I'd love that thing. Tons. I I really like my iPhone seventeen. I have basically gotten used to the size and the you know, the edge to edge screen and everything. It still might be a hair to even after two straight months of it, I it still might be a just a tiny bit bigger than I would like. So I might

I might be in the market for a a mini iPhone if it became a Neo. My daughter has a mini as a th the last mini that she has a thirteen mini and I would I would Okay. I do have old guy eyes now and I have to get readers or some sort of weather glasses. Yeah, the big screen is nice for that. Yeah, but but Big screen aside, it is so nice to have a phone that you can your thumb can hit the entire screen on. Yep. The whatever the um

What is their the name for their like shift the entire screen down half the screen heights? It's still in there. Yeah. You can still do it, but that that's a poor substitute for being able to just Cover the entire phone with your thumb. Bad heck. Uh so anyway, yeah, that's my wow. That's man, I Would like to see that. I think I think that like they've d been dancing around different ways to brand the small phone. Hm. And I wonder if Neo i is the new thing that means small. Okay.

Anyway. Um uh last hardware hit this is the last thing I think. Uh Intel pretty minor one. Yeah, Intel announced uh new core uh C Aero Lake CPUs. So these are the Desktop hardware that came out end of twenty twenty four? Yes, Aerolake came out well, like September of twenty twenty four. I guess yeah. I keep I keep a decent eye on CPU news. This is this is the very long rumored Aero Lake refresh. This has been rumored for like a year. Mm-hmm.

Uh and finally it is only in the final analysis is it's only two SKUs. Well it's So it's four SKUs, but two of them are the same as the other two. K K and KF variants of each. The F variants are no graphics, right? Yes. Or it's the the KF, right? It's K and KF KF variant doesn't have graphics on board, I believe, is the difference. K does, I believe. So so the rumors were so that it's It's coraled it's basically a five and a nine. Or I'm sorry, a five and a seven. Excuse me. There is a nine. I

I hate that they dropped the I think mid range and the low end, but not the high end. I five and I seven and I nine were some for some reason easier to say or more identifiable when you just'cause they've been around for a long time. Well, I know, but when you just say five, that doesn't mean any much unless you really establish a core five, core ultra five, what like the branding I feel like is worse.

I think the I think the unit like a number without my chemistry teacher, Miss Chartung, always used to say, If you give me a number without a unit, it doesn't mean anything. That's exactly what I'm saying. Yeah. That's your your chemistry teacher knew what he was talking about. She. But yeah. Oh, sure. Um So there was a um it so it it's it's two hundred fifty K and two seventy K, which build on the two forty five K and two sixty five K. There was a two do they break it out. Well, okay, yes.

those products in the in the internal composition of the chip, maybe TBD. Maybe it's a it's the other direction. But the the reason I bring that up is that until a month or two ago there was a rumored two ninety K. coming that apparently got killed off at some point a couple of months ago or maybe earlier.

So there is no there is no successor to the two eighty five K is what I'm saying here. High end. The the the high end chip does not get a successor. The weird thing though is that the seven part now has the same core configuration as the two hundred eighty five K as the nine. That's very strange. And and the five part has the same core configuration as the old seven part. Wow, that's shocking.

Actually it doesn't. It has two more cores, doesn't it? Mm, I think it's parody. So the seven definitely has eight and sixteen. The seven is the same, yeah. And and I and the

Five is now six and twelve. Oh, okay. Which I'm pretty sure is what the seven was previously. Or maybe no, maybe you're right. Maybe the seven was eight and twelve previously. I think it was eight and twelve. I think that's right actually. Maybe they're disabling a couple of cores. I to me to me it seemed like The high the two seventy is hey, we have some core ultra nines that didn't hit clocks on all the cores.

And the 250 is, hey, we have some 265s that maybe had some cores that were a little wonky. That's definitely how it looks. To me, bas basically the the the seven part is the same core configuration as the two hundred eighty five K, but like two hundred megahertz less boost clock. Yeah. So what you're describing makes sense.

Until you look at their slides where they are all over the place saying fastest Intel gaming CPU to date. I think there's two things that happened here. One is that they are supporting faster memory. So they're supporting D D R five seventy two hundred and it's unclear exactly what form that takes'cause they remember they support different kinds of RAM now too.

Uh they r they support the the uh C. C U C U DIM thing. Yeah. That those are the ones with the clock drivers on the DIM? Basically, yeah. Yeah. Um D do you need that at seventy two seventy two hundred? That's uh that is that is a question I'm dying to know the answer to, Brad. Interesting. I thought I thought you only saw those at like eight thousand and above or something.

I have as somebody who used to run a seventy two hundred uh DDR5 system and it didn't last that long. Uh-huh. Uh I have some thoughts here. Interesting. What I will say is This 270K plus seems like Intel continuing the tradition of making some really badass mid-range parts. Like if you look back at like the the Raptor Lake refresh stuff, the 13700K and the 14700K Problems with that platform aside. Those were the sweet spot. The seven yeah. Unbelievable chips for the money.

Again, same core configuration as a two hundred eighty five K, but it's only two hundred ninety nine dollars versus like what is the

H the the nine part is like five hundred and something? I don't know what the that's what it launched at. The street price is lower now because like people are buying X three Dradeons instead. But but two ninety nine MSRP for this thing.

And so it's it's a good deal. And and there's one other there's so there's one other improvement here which seems like the actual improvement, which is they say that there is a there is a nine hundred megahertz increase in the speed between the SOC and compute tiles. Like the SOC is where the memory controller lives and the compute tiles where all the CPU cores are. And so So that that's like I think it was two point one gigahertz on that interconnect.

on the uh initial aerolake and now it's three gigahertz. And I wonder if that's where a lot of the gaming uplift is coming from. So one of the things that we talked about at PC World a lot when we were when I was benchmarked,'cause uh like I ended up doing most of the arrow like benchmarking'cause uh Adam got covet or something. It was sick. He had the flu real bad or something. And One of the things that was interesting about those boards is in the BIOS you can configure

You have you have really granular control over a lot of bus speeds. Yeah, so I I read that there's a name for that. I forget what Intel called it, but they did roll out a a UEFI feature where you could up the speed of that interconnect on the launch aerolake ones, but I wonder So what does that mean? Is this a bigger increase than those or is this a more like a guaranteed

But my yeah, my guess is that if they're saying it's faster than they're actually shipping it at a c at a faster clock. Yeah. Um but but it like that's with the cause the way these the way I can't remember the way Aero Lake works. The way Panther Lake works is

Some of the efficient cores are on the SOC tile with all the IO stuff. Four of'em are Yeah, those are the L V E cores, I wanna say. Yeah. And then the other ones are on with the shared L three cache uh on the compute die. So I I don't know. I I it's it's interesting. I'm glad that they're doing it. I like I think I I'm kinda stoked to see new benchmarks for these CPUs because like I know that they had a bad launch. E everybody

In twenty twenty four had bad launches. Everybody messed up those launches in novel and interesting ways. Um, I've seen a couple of YouTube videos where people have gone through and tested the launch core ultra arrow like parts and had kind of surprisingly good results. Yeah. There there's been like Pharonix actually ran a Linux benchmark uh test suite in that exact vein of basically it was like Arrow Lake one year later or something with all

kind of microcode and UAFI updates. And there were there in some cases there were like pretty sh substantial performance gains on the benchmarks they ran since launch. Yeah. And well and so yeah, I don't know. We'll see we'll see what the numbers say when the when the when the whenever the embargo left. My my curiosity is kinda piqued about this two hundred seventy K'cause I've been I've been pretty itchy about this fourteen nine hundred K

Yeah, it's a scary. You got a ticking time bomb there, baby. It's like a it I had a black screen of death once. That long ago, which I've never seen before. Was it was it the screen just turned off or did you have a blue screen that was black? It was it was a blue screen. It had white text on it.

You can change that by having to write a full dump instead of a mini dump. Oh I should figure out how to do that then because it because I it was only on screen for like two seconds and then it hard rebooted and I

I had just enough time to read something about some kind of like fatal hypervisor error. Yeah. And I like I I've got a W S L two instance running pretty much at all times, so I'm sure it was something to do with that, but like Like there's there's been a little bit of jank to this system and also like the Raptor Lake just is insanely hot, you know, like it just sucks a ridiculous amount of power.

So like I'm kinda curious about this thing, if this thing is actually like even comparable or slightly faster for in games. over what I've got. Like I I don't know. It's gonna be slower than the fourteen nine hundred K. Well, but I mean maybe. But their their slides say fastest gaming CPU Intel has made. Yeah, but I don't you tell me if that's like based on X, Y, and Z external factor that like benchmarks are benchmarking benchmarks are a fine art, right? I assume.

Yeah. People have been real serious about internal marketing benchmarks now. That's good. But like frankly though, even if it was comparable or even just a Tad bit slower. Like looking at I've I was looking at some two eighty five K com comparisons to the what I've got recently. Like we're talking in games like sixty to a hundred watts less consistently, like twenty to thirty degrees cooler.

Pretty fucking big. Like I would I would happily give up like five to ten percent game performance for for efficiency gains like that, frankly. Well, so it's it's interesting'cause that's the that's the thing that I think about a lot.'Cause I'm on that ninety eight hundred X three D these days. And it's eight cores. And I often am doing stuff that could use more than eight cores. Yep. But I also play games fairly regularly and like

Would I sacrifice a little bit of gaming performance for more could more perf when I'm doing heavy workloads? Yeah, probably at this point. Yeah. Um I so yeah, I I don't know. It's it's it's interesting. It's I'm glad they're out there doing this. I'm excited to see what the numbers look like. Um also s seems like maybe a good sign for Nova Lake. I don't know, we'll see.

I'm I am I think the Panther Lake stuff is much more of a good sign that for Nova Lake. The Panther Lake the Panther Lake benchmarks have been pretty promising from what I've seen. Yeah, I I am news about Panther Lake and Lake and Wildcat Lake and sort of embedded NUC mini PC type.

Panther Lake boxes is agonizingly slow in trickling out. I am like dying to see where that stuff ends up. Well, and I and so Brad, I've been running a two hundred forty five K on the stream machine for the last little bit in my in my office and Like even running the Twitch enhanced broadcasting stuff, which is like

you know, doing six streams or something like that from fourteen forty P sixty on down. The the top two or three I think run on the GPU, but the rest are just running on the CPU. Like the three twenty by two hundred one runs on the CPU for obvious reasons. Wow, you Is that automatic? Do they select that resolution automatically or do you tell it to do that? No, so the Twitch Enhanced Broadcasting, it does all the resolutions that you feed out and you're just and then it they just repeat them?

So that your latency on like phones and TVs and stuff like that is low. That's like a phone that's a phone resolution, basically. Yeah. Or or like in a window on your desktop probably. Right. I guess they're dynamically scaling what they're feeding you based on the size of the viewport. Yep.

And um it's been it's been really solid even on like the small, the baby CPU. So wow. So most of those encodes are running on this the integrated GPU? It looks like most uh no, no. They're running on an external GPU. And then the the the big ones run on the external GPU, the small ones run on the CPU, just with F F M bag. Yeah, yeah, it's all software. Oh wild. Yeah.

Huh. Yeah, and it's still like six percent CPU utilization. It's like it hardly does anything. Yeah, like the my fan, especially since I stopped using fan control in Windows and tried to start doing stuff through the BIOS. Oh, good luck with that. I mean it it sucks. Like I've gotten close to what I had in fan control, but it's still

Spins up and down more than I like. But like this thing I launch Discord and this thing start roars for a couple of seconds, you know, like the like that's just Well, you're on an air cooler too. I am on an air cooler, yes. Well you gotta get it y it's a Yeah. Like like running an air cooler on a fourteen nine hundred K, that's a that's the choice.

Yeah. Gotta get that AIO life. Get that water in there to buffer your temperatures. I I looked at um whichever AIO Gamers Nexus says is the absolute best. Oh the Arctic? Yes. Arctic Uh, there's f the frozen three or something. There's there's basically the three sixty and the two and the two eighty are basically the same amount of cooling. Like The one that they unequivocally said was the best performer I looked at it, it has a mandatory contact frame. Yep.

And I Well only for LGA only for Intel CPUs, for AMD it's just yeah. I dude, I want nothing after my experience getting the contact frame working on this rapper lake, I'd want nothing to do with contact frame ever again. Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of contact franks. I it was it took so many tries to get the to get the um tension or whatever exactly right so it would boot stable stably.

So that um that cooler's great for AM4 and AM five. I wouldn't use it for Intel. Yeah that that's that's a real bummer. Anyway, like a long story. Oh sorry, there's one other thing about this, which is that they are adding a feature called binary optimization.

Oh yeah, the BPO. Like the BOT. B O T the B O T feature in the APO. Yeah. The B O T in the APO. I I believe it's in APO, which is what is that, the application? It's the it's it's their it's like the It's the thing that l manages the overclock for for games.

of your cores are the best performing and stuff like that or the Yeah, I the Ryzen Master does that maybe. I don't I don't believe that's that's that's that's I don't usually run that stuff. Yeah. I d I don't either and that's why I'm a little

I don't skeptical is not the right word, but I there's kind of an asterisk next to this, which is that anyway there's this binary optimization feature that is now I think part of the APO application. Okay. And it sounds like I'm I'm guessing they're benchmarks. Well they had asterisk next next to the games that did Reflects using that tool. Like like the the big like twenty, thirty percent performance gains they were showing looked like they all required that tool.

So what what does that mean for people who game in Linux is my question, because that tool obviously is not available in Linux. So piss off. Right. So I I assume you tell me, but I I'm sure every hardware site will test with and without that application to see what the difference is. Generally Generally when there's a new feature the like that comes along, we have a we we somebody takes the time to learn how it works and then we have a long conversation about how it works.

and decide if we're going to use it for benchmarking. Interesting. Okay. Um my my guess thinking about it, you'd you'd asked about the hey, this is our fastest gaming CPU ever. I wonder if that's specifically um I w I wonder if that's specifically because of the memory the sev D D R five seventy two hundred. Yeah, I'm sure that's a big part of it too. Well yeah. If you're looking at like Unreal Four games

That are almost all memory bandwidth limited. Yeah. And then you increase your memory bandwidth by to like 12% or whatever that is, 8%, you're gonna see a boost just like a linear boost just from that increase in memory bandwidth. Yeah, that that is something to think about. My memory is six thousand and I sure ain't buying any new memory anytime soon. So I don't know if that might be a constraining factor actually. Yeah. Yeah, like I I looked at um

I looked up a DDR five seventy two hundred kit and it was eight hundred dollars for thirty-two gigs. Yeah. No thanks. Dude, the SSD I bought in November has more than doubled in price. It was like$300 thin and it's$722 now. Bad times. Yeah, bad times.

Uh well on that note, thanks everybody for listening to the show. Um I guess we could also talk about the Valve hardware. Delay not delay delay. Seemed like not non news. They they some in their year in review twenty twenty five, some language slipped out about we hope to ship the steam machine and frame this year.

In twenty twenty six. Right. Which was a far cry from when they were saying, Yeah, we'll be out in the first half. Yeah. And then they but they very quickly backpedaled and like it it it says very explicitly like we'll sh we'll ship in twenty twenty six, but that's still a soft delay.

Yeah. Because previously they had said by in first half by June. Well th like look now they're saying we'll ship this year. Look, that's a real master class in how to do a delay without getting grief for it. Cause like They did the bad delay and they were like, Oh no, no, no, that was a mistake. Everything's cool. Mm-hmm. And then, you know, here nobody's talking about the we're not shipping in the first half anymore. Yep. Good job. Thanks, AI. Yeah. Um

That'll do it for us this week. Thanks everyone for listening. Thank you. Uh as always, thanks to everybody who supports the show. We wouldn't be here without you all. We wouldn't. We are listener supported. That means without listeners.

You. Not you, but them, Brad. And their support. Yeah, and their support. We wouldn't be here. Uh so thanks to everybody who support uh uh to find out how to support the show. This is an important thing I have to say every week. You go to patreon.com slash tech pod. Brad, do you know what that URL is? Is it patreon.com slash tech pod? It is patreon.com slash tech pod. Where For five US dollars a month. That's

Yeah, I used to say it was like a cup of coffee, but I went to Starbucks the other day and got a cup of coffee and it was nine dollars. Good God. Was that like a fancy with stuff in it? Just literal black coffee? It was a no, I I mean it was a latte, but it was a big latte. Man. I mean it was a like look. Realistically kind of a bucket, but You know, I needed I needed a coffee. Moving into a real like rice and beans kind of lifestyle here, I'm afraid. Look.

I I made soup beans two weeks ago for Sunday dinner and it was everybody was a fan, so we we really gotta batten down the hatches. Uh I mean we collectively as a society things are Or wild. Let me sugg what about port what if what what if we invest in torches and pitchforks? That that also that's also about it. Yeah. Yeah. That that requires a certain amount of gumption, but

Uh look, we buy some torches, we buy some pitchforks, we start walking east and just see where it takes us. Sure. You know? Uh but in lieu of that, you can also go to patreon.com slash techbod and support the show so we don't have to resort to torches and pitchfork. Uh as always, thanks to everybody who supports us. But a very special thank you goes out to our executive producer, tier patrons.

including OpenAI Delenda Est, Andrew Slosky, Jordan Lippitt, Fiends, five, Colonel Bunnies, but in Australia, I think Bunny Fiend must be on vacation. David Allen, James Kamick, and Pantheon, makers of the HS3 high speed 3D printer. Thank you all so much. Yeah, thank you to all.

Uh, we will be back next week with another edition of the Tech Pod. I realized I didn't tell people what they get when they subscribe, but you get access to the Patreon exclusive episode every month. Where we talk about whatever crazy business Brad's cooking up that he was like, I'm not ready to talk about it this week. Man, I've been hard at work in the lab. Yeah. And then the the the NAS backup thing.

Is in progress. Oh. It has grown in complexity substantially. Oh, hell yeah. This is gonna be good. Can't wait to hear about this. Um, and then uh yeah yeah, you also get access to the Discord, which is full of beautiful people who talk about all sorts of nerdy stuff all the time. If you want more Pimeroni talk, let me tell you, you can go in there and they are all up in that business. I'm oh the oh it is Pimaroni who makes that?

Signable sign the Galactic Unicorn or whatever it is. Yeah. They make that Pibo case. Uh huh. They made uh the GitHub conference badges that you can play Doom on too. Uh yeah. Yeah, they do cool stuff. Uh but we'll be back next week with another edition of the TechPod. Until Please, consider the environment before printing this podcast.