What is it with the AMD Adrenaline Software?

Very quick one, I've taken delivery of a new Graphics Card... (oooooo ahhhhh).

And it's a seed change for me as this is my first ever AMD graphics card, so this is of course going in my own main PC, which itself is my first ever AMD CPU powered machine I am therefore all Team Red for the first time ever... EVER!

I have been so excellently impressed with the performance of the Ryzen Zen 2 chip at the heart of my machine and my old EVGA 1080 GTX Superclocked was showing its age.  It was therefore time.

Unfortunately I made a huge mistake... No, it wasn't the model, no it wasn't the price, no it wasn't even paying to import it (because it was cheaper by a margin to have the card fly all the way to me through customs from California than actually buy it here in the UK - Thanks Brexit! - Not).

Anyway, it arrived and I plugged it in, and my monitor didn't come to life; I then found the signal was going to my massive 4K TV (on the HDMI) not my monitor (on the display port - go figure).

That sorted I then needed drivers, so I went to the AMD site and looked and found what it said was the best package to install on Windows 10 64bit for this card....

I don't know ANYTHING about the AMD software, and oh boy is that a mistake.

I installed it and was immediately REALLY REALLY IMPRESSED with it!  Yep, it's beautiful (even if it is backed by Qt and I hate Qt) and smooth and does wonderful things.

Unfortunately, and this is key, it was taking a lot of CPU whilst doing this work... So I closed it... and it STILL took a bunch of CPU, nearly 10%!

Just idle at the desktop, 10% CPU.

I was properly baffled by this, it must be doing something, so I went through all the settings and disabled everything I could see, everything turned off, clean reboot, and it was still taking 10% but now was peaking to 14% on odd occasions just idle!

What the heck, a bunch of goodling and I can find a bunch of folks complaining about exactly this, and one guy properly threatening to boycott their brand unless they explain how to just install the drivers without this software suite.  There was no answer to these please, and they were old posts, like there's been an apparent hard reset of the search results for this kind of question.

I spent a bunch of time trying to fathom this issue to no avail, so I like my forebears in the search results set about trying to find JUST a driver package.  I could not find one,

I therefore just decided to pull the card and possibly return it.  And so uninstalled the AMD Adrenaline Software, it took its time... And really grated on me as it spent about two minutes showing me the text "We value your feedback"... without ever giving me a link or contact in order to tell them anything... and this is during an uninstall process; surely someone when they added this eye stabbing annoying message thought "Oh we need to have them able to give me feedback!" ... Nope, seems not.

Now completely uninstalled and the package opens a website... This website... which I link only for you to see... as it's an advert... for a version of the very card I am uninstalling the software for.... Yes, AMD that's pretty tone deaf, also... WITHOUT YOUR DRIVERS INSTALLED YOU CAN NOT VIEW THAT SITE, so double double own goal there .... Less Advanced Micro Devices and Anyone Might Despair.

Here I am then, flabbergasted, back to a tiny resolution, opening chrome and trying to find just a raw driver package and I can't find one.  My machine has now cooled and I hear the CPU pump has ceased whirring away, as it was constantly with the 10% load on it!

I sat looking for ages when I first installed the card, really ages, we're taking an hour before I went with this Adrenaline stuff.

When suddenly Windows itself kicks into life and installs the Microsoft supplied WHQL driver, and guess what?  Yes, it's the same base driver, and it works absolutely brilliantly... and crucially my machine is not taking any CPU when idle, it's gone quite quen idle, I'm sat now typing this with a YouTube video playing, about 6 chrome tabs open and a copy of Visual Studio Code open too and it is silent, the machine is silent, just as I built it to be (unless under load).

Looking about I see AMD are recruiting software engineers, I have no idea what for, but if they see these pages - I'd suggest a bunch of refactoring is due over there folks.

New Blogger is Bullshit (and Slow)

The new blogger interface.... Gah, so I hate it, they've moved things around and it's so very very slow, I just wrote my first blog post with it and getting the labels on took literally minutes as you type and it flickers about and then just terrible.

It was sluggish to do anything at all, including formatting.  Literally to select all then justify took tens of seconds.

It's instant in here, always has been... stupid new interface...

It's a great example of change for changes sake.

C++: The Dilemma of using Exceptions

As a C++ developer I've recently been in the midst of the Exceptions debate.  Exceptions as a feature of the C++ language have long divided the community, naively I've often put this down to their coming to the language from elsewhere (C perhaps) where exceptions were not the norm.

This was a mistake, for in the projects I've previously worked upon the overhead of an exception compared to the ramifications of the error resulting in a crash have often totally outweighed the overhead, making deciding to employ an exception exceptionally easy (*bum bum*).  Exceptions were the norm, still are and should be to you too (according to the C++ Core Guidelines https://github.com/isocpp/CppCoreGuidelines/blob/master/CppCoreGuidelines.md#Ri-except).

The difficulty, the dilemma if you will, comes not from the feature, but the cost.  If you application domain demands high performance you can not risk using exceptions, the argument carries on therefore whether in not using them to avoid that overhead in performance you are actually cutting off your nose to spite your face... What are the downstream costs if an unexpected, in tested for, error occurs and some strange behavior ensues, or worse it propagates up and out of your application to crash?!!

In the modern era of social media such feedback is near instantaneous, can you afford the egg on face?

And so you spin yourself around and dig further into the ground your problems.

Voices from industry do little to alleviate the problem, google for instance (https://google.github.io/styleguide/cppguide.html#Exceptions), almost seem to advocate using exceptions if from the ground up you can build them in.  You stand the cost of retraining developers and change your ways of working around (e.g. embrace RAII).

They even go so far as to state "the benefits of exceptions outweigh the costs", but then add the caveat "in new projects".  How old or new your project should not define your error handling mechanisms, surely?  Plus from experience I've always found a code base is as old or new as the minds working upon it.  If you have an engineer firmly rooted in C without exceptions they will continue to churn code in that style through your compiler (which will happily work with it), not because it's a better way of working nor because it's a worse way of working, quite often it's continued along simply under the inertia of experience that developer has and they've not time to stop to take stock.

Even given that time, which the project I've just begun working upon has, there's weight behind the past, the old way of working, what worked before, and if that was non-exception handling code people stick with it.  Tell those self same people "you really should use these, oh and you have to retrain your minds, plus it'll take longer to compile and more time to run" they're going to stare at you like you're mental.

The question I'm left with is therefore not whether to use exceptions or not (well I am left with this problem, and this post is no help) instead we're left with the question of when will the benefits of exceptions, their ease of use, simplicity to write and visualise out weight the retraining, compile time and runtime costs?... I don't think that's anytime soon, it should be after so many years, but it's simply not.

x

WarThunder - BR6 - 109 Performance - Help Me?

I've got to preface this post with, I do not want this to be the usual "Russian Bias" rant at WarThunder, because in this case I've taken a look and I don't think it's Russian Bias which is my problem, it's lack of skill on my part... Let me explain.

I spent a fair amount of time last week playing WarThunder, playing Realistic Air Battles flying out the early tree 109's.  I flew the E-3, F2, F4 and G2 variants.  I got kills, lots of kills, I felt no frustration and I aced the G2-Trop for my trouble and unlocked the G13 and got well into 66% of unlocking the K4 variant.

Good progress for me, saying I can't play very often...

So, this week, I wanted to make progress on the 109 tree above the G2, specifically the G10 and G13, and unlock the K4.

Frustrated, wouldn't cover my feelings, first of all the default ammunition seems to make no impact on targets, I raked a P51D's belly with the dual 13mm MG and cannon of the G13, only to have it register 2 hits, I've sprayed seconds of fire at captured 190's only to see them sparkle, take no damage and turn away.  I've had to really calm myself down about not having the decent, or any, ammo belts unlocked for these planes and soothed myself with thoughts of "it will be better soon".

Unfortunately for me "soon" never came, I've been grinding all week, and all week I've had the use of the 109 thrown in my face, on one notable occasion I became the focus of every eye on my team - as they'd all been shot down - and I was back at 5K altitude (having already landed a crippled crate to repair and rejoin the fight), and all I got was abuse of a team member, whom was only a level 6 on his player card but of course knew all the tricks in the book, despite his having been shot down and my now dogfighting, not one, but four opponents at high altitude.  Of course I lost that dogfight, I did set an La-5 on fire, but he didn't go down, no of course he didn't... Meanwhile I've been burned, exploded, wings ripped off, pilot shot by a single clicking round from a B17 (yes through 83.9mm of armoured cockpit glass my pilot was sniped by a single round from a B17 gunner at over 400meters distance, didn't know a .50 cal had that penetration... oh, oh it doesn't, so my pilot must have had a heart attack that game!)

It's been dismal, and demoralising, and so I've just played another game... in the G10, I climbed high, the highest in my team, at 6K I leveled out and took a look around, there's 4 friendlies to my west, 2 to my east, east looks bad it's a Do17 and a 109 in a snarl up around 4K alt with a pair of Russian fighters (an La-5 and a Lagg3), I turn to dive to help just as both friendlies burn... Too late, too late, damn me.

The fight to the west is going on, badly for my team, but I see a 190 flying alone towards the western fight, he's right below me, he's moving, suddenly I see black smoke, he was on the tail of a friendly!... Damn it, Damn it!... But at least the friendly calls out his alt... 2.5K...

I drop my throttle, align my wings with his flight path and roll over and dive, I'm coming down on his six and he's not moving, not turning... he's not seen me!!!!

I come into firing range, and I put the pipper a head of him, and let my guns fire... the white and green streaks along his top side, I hear the squelching sound made by squib hits, I get one hit registered, two hits registered... and I flash past him and pull up to take my energy back into altitude.

Two hits, from a good 2 second burst... None of them made a difference, as I look over my wing, he's turned left and dived for the ground.

Unfortunately, I've been spotted, or he's called for help, so I see one of the La-5's to the west turn right, break from the swirling dogfight and start to come towards me... I'm zoom climbing up, 4000, 5000...5250.... before my speed is drained and I level off to make speed....

The La-5 was at around 2K altitude, some 8.4km away... Not only has he covered that distance, but he's climbed to 5000 meters and is going considerably faster to still be closing the distance with me...

HOW THE HELL DID HE DO THAT!  This is the core of my rant, I don't know how he did this, I don't want to believe Gaijin have programmed in some feature of the Russian planes I don't know about, or if you play from a Russian IP you get some benefits (the guy was speaking Russian in chat, I'm not just making this up).

His La-5, which has it came close was the Fn model, from a turning fight around 200km/h, had covered 7km of space and climbed 3000 meters in a mere minute.  UFO like performance!

But, I can see him coming, I'm now flat level, WEP on and gaining speed.... 350km/h.... He's still gaining on the distance to me... 1.4km.... 375km/h... He's still climbing, still gaining on the distinace to me 1.2km.... 390km/h.... He's not climbing, but he is still gaining on me... 0.8km... He's clearly levelled off, ready to start shooting, he wants speed now to close the gap...

I decided my only chance, is to turn on him, so split-S, inverting and pulling through, accelerating into wep at a point just below his aircraft towards me, as he starts to fire (I see his tracers) I return a burst of fire then his my rudder to skid past his shots... We flast past one another, I'm going 550+km/h back towards him... And I keep going straight, I'm soon at 4,500m altitude, 700km/h.... He is turning, horizontally!... The slowest kind of turn.... Yes I think, I'm going to escape this guy, or at least he's going to bleed energy now... surely!

Is he heck has like loosing energy, he's back on my tail now, we're going in the opposite direction, I'm at speed level, he's speeding up and already back behind me, I roll some, he's rolling with me, I don't want to loose my energy...

TRACERS!

Red tracers, flashing past my cock-pit from below, it's another Russian coming up at me, in a steep climb, he's below but coming fast, as I pass over the top of him he misses me, and I push the nose down to speed up more, I'm heading for base.

I'm down to around 2.5K alt now, and the IAS is red with warning, the enemies are not following me into this dive, I've got the speed, I level out... 750Km/h indicated, I'm sure I'll rip my wings off... WEP, vibration, altitude gone... Persuers... 

Well, they just gently now follow me in the dive, they catch me, at the bottom of my level out they're already on me, as if for every ounce of effort  I have, they have 1/3 extra...

I admit this plane is not unlocked, it's fully stock, but I'm struggling, utterly and totally struggling... I don't think I've played this wrong, I came from height, attacked an enemy, no dice, I climbed back to altitude... They followed, with ease.

All the rest of my team are down, I'm it... I'm low and fast, they are diving on me, can I take at least one with me, make this worth my effort?

I pull up, trying to take them with me, trying to lure them into a rope-a-dope, they've been blazing away with their limited ammunition, I have plenty... I go up, up... and up... 3000, 4000, 5000... They're behind me, the lagg however, is right on top of me... I'm at 200km/h... I kick the rudder over and wing over at the same time to cut the corner.... and WHAM

The 20mm shells from the La-5 cut my right wing off.

Never mind, it was a good fight, right?... I flew okay, they flew well, it was just numbers, there were two on me, two more on the way, right...

Yeah, but that 190... I had him dead to rights, he should have had more than two measly hits, he should have died... My shooting is bad?...

I go back to an unlocked plane, using an air target belt, the 109-E3.... Two planes shot down, one assist.... No my shooting is okay, I'm not going mad.  And yes I understand the slower flight path of the wing mounted 20mm from the E3 compared to the later G's prop mounted cannon.

So, I have to unlock those better belts on this plane, right, I need to find some way to get targets to earn vehicle research points... The Grind...

But what about those opponents, that seeming 1/3 advantage in acceleration, climbing?... Well the climbing we can see in the aircraft stat cards, the la-5 lists 22m/s climb speed, whilst my 109 lists only 13... That could explain some of the disparity... So, lets take an La-5 out, fly it straight and level - a better position than the one which caught me was in.

So, straight and level, radiator closed, fast fast... and climb....

I want it to climb 4000 meters before loosing energy...

I'm at 500 meters, so my target height is 4500... Lets see what happened at the top of my climb, and where that topping out was...

3900 meters... It topped out, at 3.9K... Nowhere near the wanted height, no-where near where the la-5 just caught me, nowhere near as good performance...

So HOW DID THEY CATCH ME, how do these Russian flying players always (and I mean always) get the advantage, even if below me and slower than me?

WarThunder - FW190-A1 - Definitely Broken

After my last post from WarThunder world, regarding the FW190-A-1 I had literally dozens... *cough* alright half a dozen... *cough* alright two.. e-mails telling me quite how much of a noob I am.

Thanks to you two for your fine and informative input, don't actually tell me what I'm doing wrong, don't actually help just be fucktards!

But I thought, maybe I am doing something wrong... So I decided to test my energy fighter skills against others, and luckily I wanted to unlock all the modifications on the F4F, the F6F and the Corsair... heavier, meatier, fighters I think you'll agree...

And they worked as expected, I'd climb, dive on a target jink around and climb away... I actually did best in the F4F, the F6F annoys me a little and the Corsair I'm not very good in yet... But everything worked as expected and I made decent progress, and even on the missions I lost, I felt I'd had fun, even if I just came down on a dive ran out of energy so farmed some ground targets.

The FW190-A1 immediately showed another problem at low altitude, and that was combined with the wiggling in turns it has huge ground effect... Literally you can hear the ground effect from around 200-50feet... Other aircraft you only seem to hear the ground effect around 75 feet and down... not from as high as in the 190...

I'd now tried the broken fighter, and then a bunch of really not very comparable crates... What about a stable mate of the 190... The venerable, reliable 109...

I set off on a series of missions, none of which I have screen shots for.  And I compared in my mind the climb rate, the performance in the dive, the ground effect, the turning - when forced - performance and the low level, low speed turning & performance... And you know its not bad, on any of them... Once I was in my 109F4 and the 109F4/Trop they were fine... Apart from having minuscule ammo loads the 109 performed as I expected... They even performed and took punishment quite well....

I therefore stand by my gut reaction, the FW190-A1 is broken.

War Thunder Sound Issues Resolved

An interesting upshot of upgrading my graphics card has been the total solution of the sound issues I was having with WarThunder Ground Forces...

The sound uses to stutter and stammer, it was impossible to hear actions being taken against your own vehicle and the ambient long range artillery fire was constantly taking over the sound channels.

With the new graphic card no stutter, no booming...

The exact same processor and sound system is not playing the sounds normally, my thoughts are that the sounds were always playing properly, but that there were so many sounds and so complex a scene being rendered that the graphics card became a bottle neck, holding up the PCI-e Bus, and so interrupting the sound playing.

I'll be posting more about the new performance of my rig as I get to play more games, so far I've only played one half round of War Thunder Ground Forces and an hour of Sniper Elite 2; before the wife wanted me to go run around after her like a fawning lamb.

So to anyone having such sound issues, it maybe a performance bottle-neck.

WarThunder - Douche Bags, Frame Drops and Realistic Battles

The new graphics card has arrived, so expect some game-play footage of my Realistic battles from WarThunder very soon....

Last night I actually played a few battled in WarThunder, I found a few bugs too, especially in the OpenGL Renderer.  Before I install the new card tonight I'm going to take my old settings & DxDiag info to send off to Gaijin, then install the new card and see if the same graphical bugs show up.

The reason being that the OpenGL hardware implementation on the the old cards was 2.2 and 3.2 respectively, and both showed the problems, and the new OpenGL implementation is 4.2 (maybe higher if I patch it).

Anyway, I played a good 5 realistic air battled, unlocked the P47D and flew it out... You know what its a decent aircraft, what I immediately noticed was the stock ammo load out sets aircraft on fire fast... The mission contained a set of 3 spotter AI, I took 2 of them down with high deflection shots, setting them on fire.

I then swooped down on two AI HE111's and a player 109, the player I tore up and both AI Bombers too... Over the enemy airfield I then got shot down by AAA.

The next flight out, I met perhaps the biggest douche ever in WarThunder.  He was in a Beaufighter, I'm in my P47... And he's after ground kills, I figured he had rockets and could knock out the pillboxes... No....

No he was just farming the ground targets, so when I saw him break and destroy a couple but take AAA fire, I dove into the mix and shot up a couple of AAA emplacements... Next thing I know he crosses my tail and shoots me with his MG's...

I wondered for a moment whether this was a mistake...

Then messaged... "The word you're looking for is "Sorry", you dick head"...

His reply... "no"...

No he wasn't sorry, he shot me for shooting "his" ground targets... So he was not contributing to the battle, he was just farming credits & XP... The mission was not won by killing the ground targets, indeed, I won the mission killing the last player and last AI air target, as well as emptying my guns into the AI spotted plane mission objective... 

And I was on my way back to the airfield, still with the only battle damage from that moron, when the ticker ran dry.

What annoyed me though was this douche got rewarded for being a douche, he got anti-mech, and "mission maker"... so he got 18 ground kills, but got them through duplicity and aggression towards friendly aircraft.  It stank to high heaven.

I reported the moron, and when I have the new card installed I may fire up and record the replay for my retard videos on YouTube...

This guy left a sour taste in my mouth, so I switched to playing a ground battle, going into a mixed air and ground battle with the Germans... GOD THE LAG!... The ground forces played okay on this same machine with the same settings, but adding the air and ground I got at most 10FPS, and red indications all the time on the frame rate.

Clearly, my rig can't play combined arms fights, so I need this upgrade.

WarThunder - OpenGL Performance Discussed

In the final of my series regarding WarThunder this week, I've taken a look at the performance of the OpenGL rendering options.

I've tried this on two machines, with different graphics cards, but very similar specifications otherwise, the two machines are:

Core i7 - 950 - 3.07Ghz

16GB 1600Mhz DDR3 RAM

NVidia GeForce 260 GTX 896MB DDR3

Core i7 - 3770 - 3.01Ghz

8GB 1600Mhz DDR3 RAM

Nvidia GeForce 540 2GB DDR5

Clearly one machine has the superior graphics performance on DirectX mode, yes the 540 out does the 260, just... Though my 260 is a really good superclocked edition, so much so its proving hard to find an economical replacement (pushing me to have to buy a 770 GTX just to see a significant improvement).

Most all the screen shots you see of WarThunder on this blog come from the machine with the 260 in it as well.

But so far all the screen shots have been from the Direct3D renderer.

Now, however I'm testing the OpenGL renderer, the option is listed as Test and I've also tried to collaborate my observations with other players... My overall impression is:

Half the FPS, if I got 60fps in a situation in a plane in Direct3D, I'd get 30 in the near same situation in OpenGL.  This is a rough and ready measurement taken by eye from the FPS reading given on screen in the client.

I've purposefully NOT recorded my game play, I've not run other programs nor over reached things - that is I've not thrown clouds of AI aircraft into formation within a custom battle and flown through them.  I've stuck to playing the regular game in the regular way.

Lets take a look at some screen shots:

It looks the same, I've not noticed any surface level differences, the game looks just as good.

Only when one scrutinizes things do you find the differences, if we jump into a cockpit and look around, we can see where in Direct3D we'd get smooth textures things can look quite odd:

This is the seat over my pilot's left shoulder in the Fw190 A1, as you can see there's this square stippling going on, also along the window rail you can see a darker indication that is actually a shadow from the wind shield surround.

This isn't the only odd thing noted, in the 540 card, not on the 260, I took the Fw190 into a twilight flight.  You can change this yourself in your settings under the Graphics options you need to select the Texture type of "Night as Day" (or something like that)...

When I flew the plane out on the 540 GTX, I saw this strange halow effect around the periphery:

The effect persisted against the clouds, from any angle, or against the ground.  But it did not show against clear sky.

Switching back to Direct3D no such halow was present on either card's output.

Performance wise I've already mentioned the lower frame rate, however, at one point during a pursuit in Historical battle in the Me410 I took out an enemy aircraft, with the explosion close I suddenly had a frame rate reduction down to 2FPS.  Literally slide show mode...

I used a little back stick to bring my nose up and came through it, but I'd moved around 1km before the frame rate returned to above 20 and allowed me to have some semblance of control.

I checked my logging, there was no hard drive activity, no appreciable network lag, no dropped packets, I could type into the client and ask "Anyone else getting lag", which was a reply of "nope" from a fair few players.  Yet I was at 2FPS 50 meters off of the hard deck struggling.

The optimisation of the Direct3D code being used by Gaijin is really good, they get performance out of my rigs other less intensive, less pretty, games get... So perhaps we can chalk this massive red blot on the performance of the OpenGL implementation to a lack of development/optimisation and of course the code being "Test".

But, one would assume the Mac client is already using OpenGL, are any Mac players out there able to share their thoughts?

Either way it looks promising that OpenGL does work, and this of course leaves us thinking about Linux/SteamOS.

I've been interested at looking at new CPU's and GPU's for a couple of days, not that I can afford one, but I've come to a cross roads in my thinking...

Now I can either carry straight on, or I can go left or right.. If I go left, then K is the way, if I go right its not... Let me explain.

When I talk about K, I'm talking about the current Gaming Goto Intel Core processor with a K added on, so this is the i5 4670 K and the matching i7.  Every time I turn a page about Gaming and building a gaming rig I see people say "Get the K" version... And for the life of me I can't figure out why, maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see people explaining why.

Now, you can look any place to see these chips, here they are on Amazon... And you can notice something here, a price difference, the K version has a higher price... I'm taking the right path... Right K, more cost, an added letter... It must do More!!!! MORE!... MWHOORE!!!!!.... Nope, as far as I can see the K chip does less...

The cheaper standard 4670 here does more, lets take a look at the Intel Ark page listing them...

So on the Ark there you can highlight the rows which are different, now some of the items are highlighted in error, but if we skip down to the bottom, this is where the functional changes are.  The K version has some of the Virtual technology removed...

I use that technology a lot, so a K version is not for me... But curiously, with functionality removed, the K version costs more?

This is where I'm confused, go right, enjoy the K and be in all the gaming comments... but don't be able to virtualize?  And pay more?  Go figure.

Lots of the kits I see out are also the K version bundled in.

I don't get it... I'm not able to go left, I'm not able to buy one of these kits... I don't want to go right, and buy a K.. Cus they're nerfed... So I'll just have to go straight on...

Is my direction metaphor grating?... Sorry, its because I have directions - from the multiboxer - on the mind.