Framerate - the frame bandwidth - isn't a good metric of playability for two reasons.
1. You're really interested in the latency, and latency can be much worse than 1/framerate. I used to have a first generation Rendition 3D accelerator that would do 30 fps in GLQuake, but the delay from mouse to screen was like 200ms, it sucked.
2. You want to know the worst that it ever gets, not the average. It will be worst in a rocket battle, and it speeds up after you die and respawn elsewhere. An FPS number is the average, 200 fps might be 17 fps for complex scenes and 491 fps when there's nothing happening.
Consumers use FPS to pick what 3D card they buy, and the cardmakers optimize for it. Oh well.
Music played on decent hifi gear sounds Good. And it really sounds a lot better if you can get rid of the fscking computer noise... Everybody here is like, "I just turn up the music if the noise bothers me." This isn't too bad for a lot of pop music that has practically no dynamic range. But for anything with quiet passages or subtle details, the noise obscures it.
I've been battling this issue for a while. I tried making a computer with no moving parts... It booted linux nfs-root, no power supply fan, open case for ventilation. I couldn't get the cpu (a k6-2-380) to run at full load with the largest passive heatsink I could find w/o getting too hot. Underclocking didn't help much. Running it at like 5% CPU load, it was cool, and silent. If you put your ear real close to the mobo you could just hear the cpu voltage regulator switching. That ruled for noise, but it was a scrude up setup, not really suitable for day to day use. I got sick of plugging and unplugging the fan a lot.
I settled on a normal box with normal fans, and put it in the closet and got some extension cords. This worked just as well. If you're going to try this, make SURE you get a "high resolution" video extension cable, with the RGB signals carried on 75-ohm coax conductors within the cable. This results in practically no signal degradation, as opposed to cheap video cables that turn the image into sh!t. Saving those few dollars is not worth it.
The university just relocated me for the summer, goodbye closet. A friend of mine gave me some carpet mat... guess I'll try that soon. (thanks laura)
Good luck to everybody who wants a quiet/silent machine.
evil firewalls - better tunnel than email
on
Quickielanche
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· Score: 1
Re: firewalls that people need to tunnel through - the email thing is humorous, but this is a serious issue. I recently spent a lot of time/effort helping a friend tunnel out from behind an EVIL firewall.
If the firewall allows any UDP port through, you can use CIPE.
It rocks... is point to point, requires a linux box at each end. Can use a different udp port each way. Prolly a wee tad faster than email.
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Framerate - the frame bandwidth - isn't a good metric of playability for two reasons.
1. You're really interested in the latency, and latency can be much worse than 1/framerate. I used to have a first generation Rendition 3D accelerator that would do 30 fps in GLQuake, but the delay from mouse to screen was like 200ms, it sucked.
2. You want to know the worst that it ever gets, not the average. It will be worst in a rocket battle, and it speeds up after you die and respawn elsewhere. An FPS number is the average, 200 fps might be 17 fps for complex scenes and 491 fps when there's nothing happening.
Consumers use FPS to pick what 3D card they buy, and the cardmakers optimize for it. Oh well.
Music played on decent hifi gear sounds Good. And it really sounds a lot better if you can get rid of the fscking computer noise... Everybody here is like, "I just turn up the music if the noise bothers me." This isn't too bad for a lot of pop music that has practically no dynamic range. But for anything with quiet passages or subtle details, the noise obscures it.
I've been battling this issue for a while. I tried making a computer with no moving parts... It booted linux nfs-root, no power supply fan, open case for ventilation. I couldn't get the cpu (a k6-2-380) to run at full load with the largest passive heatsink I could find w/o getting too hot. Underclocking didn't help much. Running it at like 5% CPU load, it was cool, and silent. If you put your ear real close to the mobo you could just hear the cpu voltage regulator switching. That ruled for noise, but it was a scrude up setup, not really suitable for day to day use. I got sick of plugging and unplugging the fan a lot.
I settled on a normal box with normal fans, and put it in the closet and got some extension cords. This worked just as well. If you're going to try this, make SURE you get a "high resolution" video extension cable, with the RGB signals carried on 75-ohm coax conductors within the cable. This results in practically no signal degradation, as opposed to cheap video cables that turn the image into sh!t. Saving those few dollars is not worth it.
The university just relocated me for the summer, goodbye closet. A friend of mine gave me some carpet mat... guess I'll try that soon. (thanks laura)
Good luck to everybody who wants a quiet/silent machine.
If the firewall allows any UDP port through, you can use CIPE .
It rocks... is point to point, requires a linux box at each end. Can use a different udp port each way. Prolly a wee tad faster than email.