New Forum at Hardware Asylum
Back in the days of Ninjalane.com one of the oldest features was the Ninjalane Message Forum. Sadly due to an overwhelming amount of spam the feature wasn’t brought over to Hardware Asylum in favor of Social Media. Given how popular social media is you would think it could foster a good community and following but, as the old saying goes ”Money talks and bull sh*t walks” and unless you are willing to pay to promote your Facebook posts there is a 100% chance that nearly NOBODY will see it.
With that in mind we are bringing back the forum experience in hopes of connecting with our readers and listeners of the Podcast. It will be a slow climb but with a little help the community should be hoping in no time.
Related Links
Hardware Asylum Forum
Video Card Testing
In this segment Dennis and Darren discus video card testing related to some recent comments our 980Ti Classified review got. The concerns were centered on two things. First being the games used in the review and Second the resolutions used to test with.
When video cards are tested at Hardware Asylum the intent is to provide scores that are reproducible by the public. To do this we need to run benchmarks that can be run on a multitude of platforms with a result that is not only easy to understand but logical as to why it might be faster or slower. Obviously testing in a game without a timedemo you are left with having to run a route and then tasked with running the exact same route to verify your score. The problem here is that if we reported 100FPS in XYZ game the reader won’t have any context and thus will consider the results unreliable.
As for screen resolution. 4K is the hot new thing and while it would be nice to have a shiny new 4K panel we don’t feel that enough people have those monitors to really decide to test with it. Of course, the cross argument is that testing on a 30” (2560x1600) screen is also not affordable but satisfies our high end resolution need. We also test with a fairly low resolution setting of 1680x1050 which when used in conjunction with 1080p and 25x16 so we can get an accurate look at how well the card performs and identify when the system becomes a bottleneck or if the video card is struggling.
Bottom line the framerates aren’t so much to tell the reader “This is how fast your game will run” but rather “This is how good this card runs against the reference cards in the review”. Funny thing is, this type of testing has been around for many years and the push to test with games has really damaged how video cards are evaluated and the public opinion is proof of this.
Related Links
EVGA GTX 980 Ti Classified Video Card Review
Wide Screen Gaming
4K monitors might be the hot topic in the news these days but the future may be in widescreen 21:9 both on the desktop and home theater. While the resolution war may impact how video card reviews are done that cannot stop Darren from getting the most from his games, even if the game doesn’t support it.
