New computer!

[RCHeliguy]

When I was growing up we didn't have your fancy 1's and 0's. We only had 1's.

 

[RobertR1]

What mother board is that?

 

[RCHeliguy]

It's a Gigabyte Designare. It's a solid motherboard but not particularly setup for overclocking.

The two solid aluminum M.2, "heat sinks" are pretty, but all the testing I've seen on Gamers Nexus says that they are useless and you are better off leaving them off and letting the air circulate better.

The CPU arrives today and all the cables except the CPU fans are routed. I'm looking forward to seeing how much better it runs now.

That old mini-ITX motherboard looks puny in there.

I have a small mini ITX case for the old motherboard with a 600W PS. Looks like my daughter will be getting a complete computer and Rift system for her birthday. I have an old GTX Titan ( the original ) with 6Gb of RAM and it will run the Rift, adequately for her. She's not siming. I'll put a couple M.2 drives in my new system over the next couple months and pass a couple external drives over to her so she'll have a whole system with wireless mouse an keyboard, Rift with 3 sensors and tripods.

 

[RCHeliguy]

This is amazing! My CPU is running at 19% and and GPU is at 69% at 1.8 super sampling. That's just In Death, but what I really liked was that the load appeared evenly distributed across all 16 threads!!! In Death is leveraging the latest Unreal engine and spreading the load around VERY nicely!!!

 

[RCHeliguy]

A couple more notes about the Gigabyte Designare.
1. It interrogated my computer and correctly identified my boot drive and everything I had connected to it. I simply had to save the Bios settings it created and the system booted.
2. It did have drivers on a CD to enable WIFI, BT etc.. and I used an external USB DVD player to install those. I'm sure I could have downloaded them on the internet.

So far it is only running the memory at about 2/3rd's of the memory's rated speed.
For now I'm not bothering with any OC

 

[RasmusP]

Great to see you're happy and enjoying the new parts!

My CPU is running at 19% [...] the load appeared evenly distributed across all 16 threads

This is pretty normal nowadays. Although I'm only on 8 threads, Windows manages to spread the load very nicely in pretty much all applications, even on my "old" Windows 7.
AMD seems to run a bit differently, anyway:
Don't know if you know this or not, it seems you would expect it differently reading from your post:
Although it now seems like you'd have lots of headroom with only 19% cpu load, you'll see if you uncap the fps and not run into 100% graphics card load, that you'll probably get stuck at about 50% CPU load because of the single thread limit.
My 8 thread CPU barely goes above 60% in all sims apart from ACC where it hits 80% in peaks.

You got plenty of headroom though for other games/applications!

 

[RCHeliguy]

I'm thinking ahead towards handling the framerates the Valve Index will require when it gets here.

 

[RasmusP]

Somehow it seems we're constantly talking past each other...
The Valve Index won't be able to fully use the amount of cores either since the rendering thread for VR is still the same as it is now. You have 8 cores/threads with the 9700k and 2-3 game threads.
Windows can spread the load but it can't go above this limitation.
Not sure if you fully understood what the single thread limitation is and how the amount of game threads makes the difference.

 

[RCHeliguy]

I don't think we are.
I fully understand how multi-threading works and "current" limitations utilizing it.
I was writing multi-threaded code way back when I was coding in Unix and QNX.

What I'm saying is that I have faith that software will evolve to distribute itself better to make use of the current higher number of cores available in modern processors.

Also I was looking at all of the individual core loads with In Death and it was very evenly distributed. I did not see one core loaded up past the others which gives me hope that Unreal Engine is making progress in that direction.

I believe ACC is written using Unreal engine and I'm "hoping" they are making solid use of this to distribute as much as possible.

Windows will need to accommodate this if they have OS level barriers in the way.

PS: I'm not naive enough to think this i9 is going to be in my gaming machine for more than 2 years. I think it will last me until the next big jump. Then I'll pass it up to my development box with the i7-2600K in it. I'm really hopeful for the next gen of CPU's will have microcode that can manage distributing the load between cores automatically.

 

[RCHeliguy]

I've been looking at the support for multi-threading in Unity and UE, and it appears that Unity may support threading in a more distributable way than UE does. I need to dig in a bit deeper.

BTW to be clear I got the i9 with the "hope" it would be leveraged better over time and NOT because I assumed it could do everything better than an i7 would now.

I was just watching the ACC interview and it sounds like they are working on profiling to improve the VR performance.

 

[David Turnbull]

PS: I'm not naive enough to think this i9 is going to be in my gaming machine for more than 2 years.

Jeez I just popped an I9 into my rig today and was planning to use it for 10 years

 

[RasmusP]

Thanks for clearing it up for me. And sorry for permanently stating stuff you clearly knew
I don't think the problem really lies with the unreal engine. I think it's more down to the developers who are unable to split the simracing tasks into more threads. Not saying they are lacking the skills. It just seems to be extremely difficult.
And I hate it for the fact that my old 2600k is never really used but limits me down to around 60 fps average.
I can play modern triple A games without problems but not the sims.
Thanks to gsync I'm not longer bothered though...

 

[RasmusP]

Jeez I just popped an I9 into my rig today and was planning to use it for 10 years

Looking at the cpu market, you probably will. It doesn't look well for the future of single thread speeds imo and currently more cores aren't really used.
Even if future titles would be able to max out your i9, consoles and pc mainstream will hold back the development anyway.
You might not be able to run 120+ fps for 10 years but I guess you'll be fine with the performance overall for a long time!

 

[RCHeliguy]

I think I could easily get 10 years out of my i7-2600 for use in a development box.
One reason I'm not expecting to keep my i9 in the gaming realm for more then 2 years is because my development box is due for an upgrade and I may as well just push it over, but I'm going to try to wait for the next big jump in performance before I bother.

I'm running identical cases, so the form factor is easy. I just swap a few SSD's, and I'm good to go. VR downstairs and 3x monitors in my office. I work from home so it's pretty well optimized.

 

[RasmusP]

Sweet stereo monitors there

 

[RCHeliguy]

I finally got my audio driver setup properly, Re-activated Windows, re-entered my Steam password etc.. etc.. and took Dirt Rally for a spin. Before I had pegged 4 cores before and the GPU was way under utilized. Now my GPU is up around 80%-85% and their is plenty of CPU available and yes there were 2 cores that were higher than the others, but they were still pretty low.

The way it feels is night and day better. If I had any idea that I was so CPU bottle-necked before I would have done something about this a while back.

And I'm running 90fps without reprojection!!! So I'm hopeful I'll be able to get 60 fps and 120 reprojected, or even 72 reprojected to 144 with the Valve. We will see. Also maybe it's what I'm seeing, but it feels like the motion system is more responsive now.

After seeing how much better this is, if I need one, I'll grab a 2080Ti after my Index arrives.

Edit: I'm sure it would feel the same with an i7-9700 or even an i7-8600, but it's still a huge jump.

 

[RCHeliguy]

I downloaded the latest version of the Oculus Tool Tray and started to play with SS to see where it could go.

To prove RasmusP's point I could get one of the cores to max out along with a second core coming in a close second with the SS set high enough. The core's were 90's and 80's % utilization.

In some non-sim games I could run SS at 2.0 at 90fps with no reprojection and still have plenty of CPU and GPU. In others that wasn't the case.

I tried running Dirt Rally at 45fps with AWS and SS at 2.0. It wasn't bad but the CPU was really working. I still prefer native 90fps. Dirt Rally is not the most efficient VR game, but I worked with it this morning. I could get native 90 fps the vast majority of the time up to about 1.4, but it would drop into AWS for short periods of time here and there from 1.2 up.

I'm convinced it is more responsive now since I'm now able to anticipate corners better and get the timing perfect to slide around with a hit to the emergency brake and full throttle out of the corner. Before it seemed like it was off and I could never understand why. Now I know.