BF2S Forums Tech: Open thread

You should really try a mouse with a refresh rate of 144Hz, but it might make you want to spend money.

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

You should really try a mouse with a refresh rate of 144Hz, but it might make you want to spend money.

the zowie mice do have alterable polling rates, actually, up to 1,000Hz. and yes, it does make a difference, so long as your computer's USB likes to play nice.

zowie mice offer really low DPI, very high polling rates, and you can change the lift-off distance. that plus 2 side buttons and a clickable scroll-wheel. as long as all those things are done well, i.e. with really nice switches beneath the buttons, a quality mouse wheel which is sturdy and has weight, etc., then a mouse needs NOTHING else. no RGB, no extra buttons, no macro keys, no stickers.

bitch please, zowie offered 1,000Hz like 10 years ago. i've had about 5 of their mice. currently have a ZA13, previously had a special edition quake thing.

i used one of their tiny mice for a while when playing tf2. possibly the best i've ever been in a twitch FPS game. phenomenal peripheral.

the death adder is a classic, yeah, it just depends on shape at that tier, i think. zowie might have a slightly better sensor.

zowie don't have drivers or anything like that, you just press a button combination when you plug it in to adjust polling rate/lift-off distance. they are literally plug n play. great for taking to tournaments (if that's your thing) or just plugging them into new computers/laptops on the move.

the DPI button is on the bottom, mercifully. there's a tiny LED next to it which changes colour to indicate the DPI setting. no visible lights or flair.

every single model also comes in 3 size variations, and they have multiple models according to whether you are a palm/claw/hybrid user.

i've had no reason to look at any other peripheral manufacturers, let's put it that way.

Update on Quake 2 RTX. Now in 1.2
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/ne … 1-2-update

Sliders compare opengl to 1.1, 1.2 to 1.1 , 1.2 to opengl.

The comments are pretty funny. People can't seem to agree whether it looks more like or less like the old quake.

"Now it's starting to go back to the original Quake 2 look... What's the point?"

Which is exactly what it should be aiming for. Realistic lighting within a faithful color palette.

I think the effort's in the right place, but that the direction is still wrong. The texture reworks look too clean, and things are too well lit. In one of the side-by-sides, there's an ultra glossy large screen that looks entirely out of place in a dusty Strogg installation. I think the opengl version is vastly superior. It's an alien planet and an unclean installation run by grungy cyborgs who don't even bother to clean the blood off the walls. Why do some of the screens look more at home on Star Trek. That screen should look like it's had steady contact with diesel smoke and the occasional angry fist.


So out of place with the rest of that room.


Wouldn't want to eat off of any surface shown here.

I think it would have made way more sense to do this for Doom 3, considering the lighting was that game's big tech boast back in the day.


/fwp

(cont. from other thread)

so the new MBP is probably quite simply the best laptop i have ever owned. i went with the i7 over the i9 like we discussed, which i think for anything other than rendering/code crunching users is best. i also notched down the storage from 1tb to a 512gb SSD, mostly because i was gassing for so much other tech, but also because i just don't see the need to carry around all that storage when i'll be spending the time to set-up a media NAS in the new year. i figured, what the hell, i have 160gb of storage on my iPhone, i have a 512gb retina MacBook from 2015 that is full of music (which i now keep next to my DJ mixer pretty much exclusively for mixing), and i have several external drives hanging around, as well as the NAS i am yet to set-up. i really didn't need the +£200 for a 1tb internal SSD.

i haven't been at home enough to play any games on it yet. i've pretty much abandoned the idea to run a windows bootcamp partition, in any case. the modest gaming needs i have all come with OSX versions, any way, and i can afford to take the -15% performance hit associated with it (i.e. classic WoW). i guess i can always partition off 80-100Gb or something if i really need to in the future, but honestly i don't see the pressing need. as we discussed, i saved about £400 by going for the i7 over the i9 and i always have the option in the future to get an eGPU. but i cannot actually think of a game that would make me want to invest that much money in a standalone GPU at the moment (which is basically what i've been saying about computer games since about 2012 ...)

with that said, it seems there are moderate benefits to gaming and everyday use on the 6-core over the 8-core. it runs a little quieter and a little cooler on casual tasks (good for me as i'll be using it in clamshell mode on a desk, all day long, with sensitive microphones and speakers next to it). the i9, especially when also displaying an external monitor over thunderbolt, can get quite hot (and even thermally throttle) quite quickly. i think over sustained loads they both tend to even out, on average, with temp:power consumption throttling, but by going with an i7/5500M rather than the i9/5500M, i'm just shifting around the available resources a little better for gaming and applications that mainly use, well, < 6 cores. (over long and demanding tasks, when both ramp up to full consumption and high temps, the i9 will obviously pull ahead, no question). the difference between the 5300M and the 5500M honestly seems to be marginal at best in gaming applications (the 5500M has more CUDA and i think is 20% better for rendering and crunching). honestly i'd probably get better power/thermal throttling performance out of the i7/5300 on some games, as it would allow the turbo-boost speeds to be higher. all of that side of things will only improve as the driver support improves; apple normally use their x.x.3 patch on OSX upgrades to address graphics (currently x.x.2). with better fan control and under-volting options, i'm sure gaming performance will increase in OSX and in bootcamp. it already seems very good, though.

in general, this is the best generation of MacBook pro i have ever seen. the base model is genuinely high performance, and not some gimped version with reduced graphics power like in previous years. considering the base now has 16gb RAM/512Gb SSD, etc, too, it's not actually exorbitantly expensive, compared to other top-end competitors from lenovo or dell. as i've mentioned before, they kept the entry level price the exact same as the mid-2019 models, but now you get a significant amount of more hardware. you can go nuts and customise an i9 model up to like $6,000, but actually, relatively speaking, this is the closest the top-end MBPs have ever been to one another. for anything except strictly professional rendering/coding purposes, they are all pretty much indistinguishable, and are all very nice laptops. it's at a position now where you can just customise one to your specific needs, i.e. photo-editors upping the RAM, video editors upping the VRAM, etc.





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i'm mostly gassing after music/audio gear these days. the mac is amazing for that, on account of super stable audio drivers over a thunderbolt interface. ironically many people are complaining about the T2 chip in the mac causing audio drops over USB 2.0, something about the way the data is bridged across the T2 security chip (fine with USB 3). i can see that being super frustrating, but then again i'm not some sucker who has $3,000 for a laptop but insists on still using fucking ancient DAC protocols. audio over USB2.0 for windows is a fucking shitshow, too, so i guess those users have been forced into a painful impasse now the latest macs spit in their face.

my next purchase ... way more fun than GPUs tbh.

Last edited by uziq (2019-12-22 17:23:54)

the 2070 super looks gargantuan. having looked at hardware quite a lot over the last month, i'm quite surprised how far you can go with a $1000 build now (excluding OS, peripherals, monitor, etc.). the latest generation of ryzen have just pulled the rug out from under intel for most mid-range builds, afaik. gamers have a lot of choice. maybe too much with nvidia's product stack. honestly i can't keep up with the 25 cards they have between $200-500. some manufacturer versions of the TI are as good as the next generations' super, or a generation's standard is as good as the last gen's TI, or ... ok i officially got too confused to care.

it's tempting to just build a nice micro/mini-ATX machine rather than get an eGPU enclosure. but, being honest with myself ... i just don't know what i'd actually play? thinking back, every single 'gaming rig' upgrade i've made in my life has been to play some huge, must-experience, generation-tipping game. battlefield 2, most obviously, was a game that made a lot of people step-up their rigs to cope with the 64-player, vehicle combat thing. world of Warcraft was also a game that made me need to step up from my quake-engine, call of duty 1/2, team fortress-type computer. those expenses made sense. but i think i'm kidding myself when i watch a 'cyberpunk' game trailer or some latest apex legends footage or whatever and pretend that it'll really hold my attention for more than 20 hours.

one thing i didn't mention about the MBP: the SOUND. these are the best laptop speakers i have ever heard. if i didn't have about $3,000 of sound equipment within arm's reach, i would happily listen to music on them all day long. movies and youtube content actually has a surround sound/dolby-like effect. seriously, it's that good. for your average consumer, it's a total game-changer, and wipes out the need to purchase some lame 'pc speakers'. these speakers are more than good enough all the way up to mid-tier bookshelf speakers.

the only viable long-term/heavy usage for me with headphones would be an open-back design with a nice headphone amplifier.

when i'm in the office i use in-ear monitors for about 75% of the time, and spent out on a premium (comply tips etc) to make them comfortable.

speakers are just too much fun.

Finray wrote:

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

Immediate improvement in game performance, allowing me to turn up many non-annoying details to max (bloom, motion blur, depth of field can remain off forever as far as I'm concerned)

agree so hard, DoF can be done right but the list of games that don't just make it an eyesore is probably about 3 titles long.

Any examples where it isn't an eyesore?

I started getting hit hard by visual mess while playing Titanfall. Overwhelmed by all the effects stacking into each other. Implementation where people bottom out detail or toggle a feature off just so they can see what's going on is such a waste.

"Hey, this game has pretty good looking grass fields! Let's just turn off vegetation so we can see through it. Click, click, click. Aaaaand, never to be seen again!"

oh yeah nothing touches apple for trackpads, I seriously considered getting one of the standalones a while back