PC build thread

[marurun]

New PC plans put on hold for a little bit. I had to buy a new car. But my birthday is coming up this month, so maybe I'll do it then.

[RyaNtheSlayA]

So I went and bought a new laptop out of fear of the old ones GPU kicking the bucket again - the specs on this ThinkPad will probably make some of you cringe but the easy 15 hours of battery life is pretty nice. i3-4010u, 8GB of ram, and an Intel HD 4400 integrated GPU.

To be completely fair integrated stuff, especially on these ULV chips, have come a long way. I can satisfactorily play Ground Zeroes for instance and still have it look pretty nice. Though that is equally a compliment to the Fox Engine that it runs on.

I've been looking into ways I might be able to build another gaming desktop. I'm probably going to be up at my parents for about another year. Is there a way to easily copy games downloaded to my laptop over to a desktop I wonder? I have a buddy who has real internet but I don't necessarily want to drag a desktop down to his place all the time.

[fastbilly1]

Ryan what thinkpad model did you get? The specs are fine for general use, emulation, and older games, and 14 hours of battery life is intense.

[RyaNtheSlayA]

It's an X240. I've actually squeezed 18 hours of battery with light web use and as low of brightness I could stomach. With the X250 recently out I was able to get this thing brand new for $450. Not a bad price. I'd preferred something maybe a bit more powerful but my budget was constrained and I didn't want a piece of crap that felt like it would snap in half.

And despite the lower specs it being a Windows machine gives me more options of games to play than my Mac had, even if some stuff won't run at a playable level.

[marurun]

AMD is doing really well in the early DirectX 12 benchmarks. The next generation of PC games may have AMD written all over it.

[noiseredux]

AMD is doing really well in the early DirectX 12 benchmarks. The next generation of PC games may have AMD written all over it.

I... don't predict this. They pretty much wrote off Mantle already. Nvidia has been really strong. Maybe AMD will keep up, but I don't see them leading.

[marurun]

Ars Technica has a fascinating article about this. DirectX 11 was basically not very parallelized at all. Hardware that does well in DX11 (and earlier) is strong in single-pipeline stuff, plain and simple. AMD's designs have been, for a couple years now, geared for multiple-pipeline work. This is a bad fit for a higher-level API that is single-pipeline focused. DX12 is an API that's a bit closer to the metal, if you will, and is much more easily able to parallelize functions. With DX12 software, current gen AMD cards may automatically get a massive boost, if the benchmarks are to be believed.

I don't know if AMD meant to suffer due to their forward-looking designs, but they did. But they already have an edge in designing hardware that does what DX12 loves, because they've been doing it for a while now. Nvidia will have to catch up. I'm sure they will, but I'm hopeful AMD to find a way to use this to their advantage, at least in the short term.

[noiseredux]

Well your argument has merit, I will give you that.

[marurun]

As to the bit about Mantle, I think Mantle was a response to DX11. DX12 is actually a lot similar to Mantle, so Mantle is a little less critical for AMD, at least on the PC side. That and Vulkan is a pretty direct descendant of Mantle. Mantle may remain very important for console developers to ensure good performance in cross-platform development.

I wonder if devs will tolerate lower-level APIs, though. A lot of the higher level stuff arose from lower-level 3D work being a pain in the butt. Maybe things are better now. Or maybe what's old is new is old again.

[noiseredux]

I'm not sure if Mantle was to compete with 11 or 12... it seemed to come late in 11's life and written off as 12 hit. Either way I am very happy with Nvidia these days, but wish no ill performance on AMD. Competition means only benefit for PC gamers.