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Ask GN 36: GameWorks & GPUOpen, Grounding Yourself, & More

Posted on December 1, 2016

Ask GN is a little bit more personable than our usual reporting, given the nature of the Q&A style of content. Taking that as an opportunity to update everyone on our server migration, we’ve finally moved; it was a success. The new server has been operational for a few days now, and it’s faster, more stable (seriously – 0 downtime, whereas the other began crashing every few hours), and will soon™ be home to an updated front-end for the website. We will be rolling-out small changes over the next few weeks, and those will eventually lead to a full refresh.

Anyway, Ask GN was the original topic. We’re on episode 36, and this week addresses questions of DirectX 12 scalability, GameWorks & GPUOpen efforts, electrostatic discharge and management of ESD, and more.

Episode below:

Timestamps:

0:58 - ulamss5: “Steve, are there noticeable real-world benefits to using m.2 SSDs (like the intel 600p or samsung 860 evo) series, over conventional SATA3 SSDs? Like, even shorter boot and load times? Or are the insane numbers from m.2 drives being bottlenecked by other stuff, like software/cpu/gpu?”

5:49 - Tech pascal: “I was wondering if you can explain in Greater detail overclocking processes and what they mean as far as power Target memory offset voltage etc. also what is the process you go through for each overclock.”

8:59 - Apoorv Gahlot: “Hey Steve, I wanted to ask if Desktop replacements like Acer Predator 21X really make sense ? I mean the battery life will be laughable. So what exactly makes them buyable. P.S Love you explanations, really easy to understand. thanks :-)”

11:23 - n3ziniuka5: “Hello Steve, How to ground yourself when working on a build? I heard that you can touch the power supply grill to do that, but does it have to be plugged in and turned on? Also, how do you use the anti-static wrist bracelet? Do you attach it to any metal surface or to a pc that is plugged in? Thanks?”

14:53 - il2xbox: “+Gamers Nexus Hey Steve I have an ask GN question:

Are there any games that use GPU acceleration for character AI, and if not do you know if that's something developers could do in the future? If I understand correctly, AI and machine learning algorithms can generally benefit a lot from the parallelism of GPUs. Normally a game does all the graphics processing on the GPU and all the game logic on the CPU, right? So would it be beneficial to offload some AI-intensive computations to the GPU so that games could have smarter AI characters? I'm sure AI-intensive computations being done on the GPU would still lower your framerate anyways (just like running AI on the CPU does already) but I'm wondering if the effect would be lessened since AI can be more efficient when running in parallel. Maybe having a second GPU dedicated to AI would be beneficial for this reason?”

15:29 - mike smith: “how long do heat pipe coolers last. I have had me one for three years or more its been in three different rigs now and is still working well. ps the last beard looked right..”

16:11 - Orvis25: “hey Steve, (2nd time asking) Can you explain GPUOpen (AMD) vs Gameworks (Nvidia) (specifically what the differences are in what they do) and why gameworks is still used far more than GPUOpen in games (Especially when GPUOpen is free and open source)?”

20:33 - d2ricci: “@GamersNexus  why aren't we seeing huge gains in DX12 out of the top end of DX12 GPUs similar to the draw call API test?  Is this due to the majority testing on super high end hardware or more that testing is being done at higher resolutions?”

Host: Steve “Lelldorianx” Burke
Video: Andrew “ColossalCake” Coleman