I wonder if they are putting some sort of throttling or priority queuing in the hardware to accomplish that. Care to check prime95 blend FFT time to completion/benchmark while running GPU intensive tasks versus idle besides prime95?
wrote:wrote:Today's budget stuff is so much better because RAM is so cheap now.
I actually disagree. budget stuff isn't much better, mainly because it's still starving the system of ram bandwidth by the onboard video using system ram and bandwidth for it's tasks, to the point that even some things that are simple tasks now can choke the PC. Back then we didn't have OS taking GPU bandwidth and flash in browsers eating up lots of system time, but that's kinda part of how things are now, and the end result is more or less the same user experience as it was back then with budget systems... subpar. especially with intel GMA crap.
That having been said, I am typing this on a 3-4 year old toshiba pentium dual core 1867MHz with 3GB DDR2 and an i960 chipset, and the experience isn't that bad. This was no low budget system though, those are the likes of the netbook with 2gb ram and a single core atom.
But at least they are a bit more upgradeable than they were back then. Back then they gave you some pathetic onboard video like S3 Trio and no AGP slot. There aren't many cheap PC's these days that don't have at least one PCIe x16 slot that you can put a better video card in and disable the onboard crap. RAM densities are also much higher today than they were back then so even if they stick you with only 2 RAM slots to save money you can still have enough RAM for almost anything you need. Back then having only one or two RAM slots meant you'd be looking for a new computer at the next Windows release because you wouldn't have enough to run it at anything approaching a reasonable speed.
wrote:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8GRhW0NMGU
As you can tell, I'm pretty bored today.
That whistling noise? That's my nose. My stupid annoying nose. 🙁
Reckon you're bored? I'm on my third go at installing 98SE on a P2-450. 🙁
wrote:wrote:wrote:Today's budget stuff is so much better because RAM is so cheap now.
I actually disagree. budget stuff isn't much better, mainly because it's still starving the system of ram bandwidth by the onboard video using system ram and bandwidth for it's tasks, to the point that even some things that are simple tasks now can choke the PC. Back then we didn't have OS taking GPU bandwidth and flash in browsers eating up lots of system time, but that's kinda part of how things are now, and the end result is more or less the same user experience as it was back then with budget systems... subpar. especially with intel GMA crap.
That having been said, I am typing this on a 3-4 year old toshiba pentium dual core 1867MHz with 3GB DDR2 and an i960 chipset, and the experience isn't that bad. This was no low budget system though, those are the likes of the netbook with 2gb ram and a single core atom.
But at least they are a bit more upgradeable than they were back then. Back then they gave you some pathetic onboard video like S3 Trio and no AGP slot. There aren't many cheap PC's these days that don't have at least one PCIe x16 slot that you can put a better video card in and disable the onboard crap. RAM densities are also much higher today than they were back then so even if they stick you with only 2 RAM slots to save money you can still have enough RAM for almost anything you need. Back then having only one or two RAM slots meant you'd be looking for a new computer at the next Windows release because you wouldn't have enough to run it at anything approaching a reasonable speed.
Had a Compaq Presario 4540 like that. Was an amazingly slow system. Got even worse when the cache module stopped working.
wrote:The desktop plays many of the newer games like NFS Undercover just fine.
Even my built Win7 system can't play this game smoothly!!
I remember working on a eMachine that was built right around the time Vista came out that packed a 775 Celeron and 512MB DDR2. The system took about 15 minutes to boot, no kidding!!
> W98SE . P3 1.4S . 512MB . Q.FX3K . SB Live! . 64GB SSD
>WXP/W8.1 . AMD 960T . 8GB . GTX285 . SB X-Fi . 128GB SSD
> Win XI . i7 12700k . 32GB . GTX1070TI . 512GB NVME
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ALfO0Cmj9Y
^ A system close to mine^ with GMA 4500. If you don't call that playing well then I don't know what is. It looks super to me compared to Midtown Madness NFS II SE and many vintage games.
I have the Intel Celeron E3400 800Mhz FSB 2.6Ghz on an Asus P5G41t-M LX board with 4gb of G.skill DDR 3 Memory, 500GB HDD, Corsair Power Supply and a 23" LCD custom build by me.
Budget stuff has made leaps and bounds.
wrote:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ALfO0Cmj9Y […]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ALfO0Cmj9Y
^ A system close to mine^ with GMA 4500. If you don't call that playing well then I don't know what is. It looks super to me compared to Midtown Madness NFS II SE and many vintage games.
I have the Intel Celeron E3400 800Mhz FSB 2.6Ghz on an Asus P5G41t-M LX board with 4gb of G.skill DDR 3 Memory and a 500GB Corsair power supply and a 23" LCD custom build by me.
Budget stuff has made leaps and bounds.
That's not playing well to me at all. Me personally, if a game had that low of frame rate, I would put it back on the shelf and play something else till I a better system.
I do remember those Blue Light Special machines, working with one was especially slow, I popped more ram in there for a friend and made a huge difference. Yeah constant disk thrashing kills useability.
wrote:I actually disagree. budget stuff isn't much better, mainly because it's still starving the system of ram bandwidth by the onboard video using system ram and bandwidth for it's tasks, to the point that even some things that are simple tasks now can choke the PC.
I think IGPs are completely adequate for general desktop usage. That's what a budget PC is intended for. The modern $400 machines with 4GB RAM and just about any CPU (aside from AMD Brazos or Intel Atom) are very nice in my experience. The performance for web browsing and Office stuff is not very tangibly different than a high end machine.
Gaming is a different story, but you can do more gaming on a cheap machine today than ever before.
A 64MB Celeron spent most of its time swap file thrashing on a really slow budget HDD. Apparently they also sold a 32MB version! Yikes!
wrote:wrote:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ALfO0Cmj9Y […]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ALfO0Cmj9Y
^ A system close to mine^ with GMA 4500. If you don't call that playing well then I don't know what is. It looks super to me compared to Midtown Madness NFS II SE and many vintage games.
I have the Intel Celeron E3400 800Mhz FSB 2.6Ghz on an Asus P5G41t-M LX board with 4gb of G.skill DDR 3 Memory and a 500GB Corsair power supply and a 23" LCD custom build by me.
Budget stuff has made leaps and bounds.
That's not playing well to me at all. Me personally, if a game had that low of frame rate, I would put it back on the shelf and play something else till I a better system.
I do remember those Blue Light Special machines, working with one was especially slow, I popped more ram in there for a friend and made a huge difference. Yeah constant disk thrashing kills useability.
I've seen videos of systems with nVidia 6150 and ATi HD3200 onboard video playing games at acceptable framerates. Of course, you have to turn off a lot of things to get them playable, but it is still possible.
wrote:. . . . If you don't call that playing well then I don't know what is.
erk... that was hitching so bad it was near unplayable. didn't you notice the player kept wrecking and spinning out from the lack of control induced by the hitching?
Budget stuff has made leaps and bounds.
That much is definitely true, unfortunately(fortunately? depends on your view of things) so have the games and basic software, keeping bloat and requirements in pace.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StjG480hKtI
This even has some very slight hitching but is quite playable.
wrote:But at least they are a bit more upgradeable than they were back then. Back then they gave you some pathetic onboard video like S3 Trio and no AGP slot. There aren't many cheap PC's these days that don't have at least one PCIe x16 slot that you can put a better video card in and disable the onboard crap. RAM densities are also much higher today than they were back then so even if they stick you with only 2 RAM slots to save money you can still have enough RAM for almost anything you need. Back then having only one or two RAM slots meant you'd be looking for a new computer at the next Windows release because you wouldn't have enough to run it at anything approaching a reasonable speed.
Oh, definitely! This much is awesomely true, and I applaud the companies for actually making this possible for a change. The system as sold though is still no good for anything but basic desktop usage, and in a few years systems like that will need upgrades to now nonbudget parts in order to keep up with some basic tasks. I know stuff evolves and grows, thats part of the equasion im talking about, but take a budget system from the era of the voodoo5, right when it was released... and then take a good system from that era... I had tossed together a p3 coppermine 1ghz and i815 system with winxp and voodoo5 with 512mb just to see how well it performed basic tasks like web browsing... on places that are extremely populare like youtube and facebook it did pretty well, but a budget system from the same time would ROYALLY CHOKE... I think the same sort of thing is happening with the newer systems, but like you said they definitely are upgradable which is a major change even if the original systems are still subpar.
as far as web browsing goes, I don't think today's popular sites are too useful for evaluating a decade old machine. The workloads that websites dump on the client side these days are orders of magnitude larger - back then size still mattered, static content was commonplace, and most dynamic content generation was done on the server side. Nowadays, it's a matter of routine to employ 300KB of javascript to generate <5KB of content, and the client gets to grin and bear it. Not to mention the bloat of Flash which you already mentioned.
not really taking a side in the "budget PCs then and now" debate, mind you, more like venting my frustrations with the state of affairs as a (sane?) web dev by trade.
but that's exactly why they are so useful for evaluating old machines. The industry grows in unexpected ways and at that exponential rate, and today's budget machines just won't be able to keep up, just like yesteryear's machines... partly because they cut corners to only meet current needs of basic computing, and better computers with discrete graphics and such are much better able to handle that dynamic and growing demand need further down the road, much further, partly because the industry tends to grow in the direction that the better systems have advanced in. I say part of that direction will be the added system I/O bandwidth afforded by discrete video, just like it has already, in part... take a look at GPGPU growth lately to see one example of how today's gaming stuff could possibly turn into tomorrow's required 'daily driver' computer parts.
I don't buy it. Bandwidth isn't much of an issue for desktop rendering. An old GMA950 does Vista fine in my experience, let alone today's CPUGPUs with much more bandwidth. All current IGPs even accelerate Flash and high bitrate HD video. Sandybridge even has a basic but useful super fast H.264 encode.
GPGPU isn't going anywhere for general computing, much to the chagrin of GPU companies who are trying to diversify when their low end graphics card market is vanishing before their eyes. There are a few niche areas that NVIDIA has some success in but that's it. Apps like bitcoin mining, folding and video encoding are inconsequential. Bitcoin mining in fact is leaving the realm of GPUs and heading into custom hardware from what I've read, because people with money are becoming interested.
IGPs are the future. Tablets, phones, PCs, game consoles, etc. Higher integration offers performance, power and cost benefits. Apparently in the future you can expect integrated DRAM designs too.
That's part of my point, bandwidth isn't much of an issue for general desktop use now... but I understand the point of your post, I think. You don't see things going the way I do, our views differ. 😀
Current IGPs are well beyond today's needs for desktop rendering. Current needs are still mostly met by 3 year old IGPs. I don't think many people even watch video on their PC so the HD video and Flash acceleration is even if limited value. 3D rendering is of even less value.
What I see is a future of mobile devices and software designed around them. Mobile devices like tablets may replace PCs for many people. These things are not going to get discrete graphics. Look at Windows 8 and how MS is designing it for less powerful hardware.
PCs have reached a point of diminishing returns for desktop usage IMO, and the consoles have made PC gaming remain mostly the same for years now.
BTW if you're wondering how future IGPs will get more bandwidth, look up DRAM silicon interposers. The next fancy manufacturing trick. I was trying to remember the term before but it just came to mind now. 🤣
Current Intel IGPs can already use the L3 cache for some things.
That is definitely a step in the right direction. I wonder if you may have missed my earlier statement about bandwidth and them increasing it a huge amount? I said once that happens I will change my tune. Perhaps what you are talking about is that path, I dunno at this point.
Using the extremely fast L3 cache is already a step in increasing bandwidth. The DRAM interposers in addition to 22nm affording yet more on-die cache will continue to improve things. Apparently Ivy Bridge is going to be quite a bit faster and AMD Trinity too, but the interposer stuff is a ways off yet I guess.
Obviously they could just go with more DRAM channels too, ala the LGA 1366 and 2011 sockets, but that's something that increases cost and probably power usage. I don't see this happening because of how complex the boards become.
Bandwidth is only a concern for 3D gaming though. Current CPU IGPs are already outperforming the game consoles AFAIK.
i wanna see a pic of that legendary kmart blue light pc. It must have strong magic powers to justify the interest in it.
