Products for Dumb Suckers



  • Just noticed this on Steam's app list:

    Dimmdrive :: Gaming Ramdrive @ 10,000+ MB/s (yes that appears to be the actual name of the product.)

    Might as well just name the product, "I don't have a fucking clue how memory management works in Windows 7+ and also I have an extra $30 burning a hole in my pocket".

    EDIT: Special bonus: check out the most helpful review-- the product doesn't even work with most games the reviewer tried.



  • The promo video looks like something a 12 year old would have made in the early stages of YouTube with "unregistered hypercam 2".

    It even has notepad.exe open because they couldn't figure out how to overlay text on Windows Movie Maker for Windows XP.


  • kills Dumbledore

    But it works

    in a seamleass way

    It must be good



  • I can't even imagine what person has enough RAM to dedicate 20+ GB of it to (say) Advanced Warfare, but at the same time can't afford a SSD.

    It's a product for dumb suckers on like 2 different levels. They're dumb for buying it, and they're dumb for buying such a weird, mutant computer that can even make use of it.



  • @ben_lubar said:

    The promo video looks like something a 12 year old would have made in the early stages of YouTube with "unregistered hypercam 2".

    In a huge empty room, and who didn't bother to do any sound editing to get rid of the annoying reverb.

    I'm always amazed at what YouTube users think is "acceptable quality" when it comes to video. I mean, I'm no Spielberg, but I get the fucking basics right at least. Or, if I don't, I'm at least properly ashamed of it.



  • It apparently has a mode where it only stores "rapidly accessed files" like "maps and textures".

    Because video games load maps and textures from disk "rapidly" and not just once when the game loads a map for two seconds.



  • Why, yes, gamers are stupid.



  • @chubertdev said:

    Why, yes, stupid people can be gamers.

    FTFY



  • @ben_lubar said:

    Because video games load maps and textures from disk "rapidly" and not just once when the game loads a map for two seconds.

    If the resource manager does lazy loading and/or it's a paged world, there can still be a lot of disk churn beyond initial load. However, in that case, you're pretty much screwed no matter what.



  • I think it's a given that any PC gamer who sees any appeal in a product like this is stupid. Probably an asshole, too.



  • Either that or they have no idea how technology works and they have way too much money but no idea that better hardware can make a computer run better.



  • I was thinking more because they would be the HURR HURR PC GAMER MASTER RACE 160 FPS++ kind of dickwads. But whatever, as long as we're calling them morons I guess it doesn't matter what specific kind of morons.

    Let's market a program that de-frags a Dimmdrive. Sell it for $20. That should make your gamez EVEN FASTER!



  • @blakeyrat said:

    I can't even imagine what person has enough RAM to dedicate 20+ GB of it to (say) Advanced Warfare, but at the same time can't afford a SSD.

    Clearly, someone needs to make a motherboard with at least 100 DIMM slots so that the entire contents of the hard disk can be loaded into memory.


  • FoxDev

    @Groaner said:

    Clearly, someone needs to make a motherboard with at least 100 DIMM slots so that the entire contents of the hard disk can be loaded into memory.

    well if i cared to fork over crap tons of money my motherboard does technically support 128GB of RAM.

    i didn't want to spend that much on RAM and decided that 32GB was probably enough.



  • @accalia said:

    i didn't want to spend that much on RAM and decided that 32GB was probably enough.

    It's probably 24 more than you need. I mean I don't know what you do with it, but my machine has 8 and I have trouble giving it any memory pressure at all. I think once I hit 60% active memory usage.

    Then again, you're probably running some Linux with shitty memory management so... that would explain it.



  • @accalia must be running this.


  • FoxDev

    @blakeyrat said:

    Then again, you're probably running some Linux with shitty memory management so... that would explain it.

    windows 8.1 actually.

    under normal usage i would agree with you. some games do want more but few. even visual studio has trouble using it all up.

    but i do develop in VMs so this gives me 3 8GB vms running at the same time with 8GB left over for OS. also lets me setup a RAMDrive to use as scratch disk for PS and video editing.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @accalia said:

    but i do develop in VMs so this gives me 38GB vms running at the same time with 8GB left over for OS.

    That's not how Maths works ;)



  • @loopback0 said:

    That's not how Maths works ;)

    but that is how vulpine spellaring and gramming works.


  • FoxDev

    no but it is how missing spacebarworks.

    HANZO'd



  • @accalia said:

    also lets me setup a RAMDrive

    Oh shit Ben L was RIGHT.

    BTW, benchmark it with and without the RAM disk. I bet there's zero difference in performance, or near-enough zero that it can't possibly outweigh the time/effort expended in creating the RAM disk in the first place. Idiots all over today.


  • FoxDev

    @blakeyrat said:

    Oh shit Ben L was RIGHT.

    RAM drive, not DIMM drive.

    mounts as a regular windows drive and lets programs store files on it. it's /dev/shm for windows

    and unlinek DIMMdrive it was both free and actually works.



  • @accalia said:

    and unlinek DIMMdrive it was both free and actually works.

    Prove it.

    Prove it with numbers, not "gut feelings". I want to see all the proofs.


  • FoxDev

    @blakeyrat said:

    BTW, benchmark it with and without the RAM disk. I bet there's zero difference in performance, or near-enough zero that it can't possibly outweigh the time/effort expended in creating the RAM disk in the first place. Idiots all over today.

    CS5 is still faster with it. don't ask me why adobe wants to write out and discard 500MB of data when applying complex filters on 1080p images but it does and the faster it can write the faster it renders.

    video rendering is faster by about 5% when using two pass encoding because the intermediate results are written to faster disk to be used for the second pass. that adds up when you're rendering ~60 minute "bluray" quality videos

    of course these are specialized applications. your average user won't need a RAMDrive, hell most power users won't need a RAMDrive either



  • @accalia said:

    CS5 is still faster with it.

    Does Adobe not name their products anymore? What CS5? Premiere? Flash? Photoshop? Illustrator? Your rancid asshole? WHAT!

    In any case, that might be true on the technicality that Adobe products are shitty pieces of crap. I still highly doubt you'd find it faster if you got out a stopwatch and measured. (Which I'm sure you haven't done, because I believe you have a very soft and mushy thinking process that doesn't require things like "objective evidence" before making decisions.) But I concede that it might be possible.

    @accalia said:

    video rendering is faster by about 5% when using two pass encoding because the intermediate results are written to faster disk to be used for the second pass. that adds up when you're rendering ~60 minute "bluray" quality videos

    That doesn't make sense to me. You can't fit a 60 minute BluRay-quality intermediate render on your RAM disk. Unless you put those scare-quotes around "bluray" for a very good reason, and it's really "DVD quality at best maybe". Or you're rendering in 10-minute segments, and even then it'd be tight.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Does Adobe not name their products anymore? What CS5? Premiere? Flash? Photoshop? Illustrator? Your rancid asshole? WHAT!

    CS5 is a collection of products. You could say that it's a.......creative suite of products.


  • FoxDev

    @blakeyrat said:

    What CS5?

    photoshop.

    i'm buttuming the issue is present in all CS5 products.

    @blakeyrat said:

    I still highly doubt you'd find it faster if you got out a stopwatch and measured.

    last time i measured whas fir Photoshop 6 when i started using the ramdrive. almost tripled the speed of the render. since then i've just used it, and given that the ram drive is reporting significant use from Photoshop even today i'm buttuming that there's still a speed increase. and if not it takes me 5 minutes, once to set everything up, and then a mouse click to activate/deactivate the ram drive from then on. literally any speed increase will pay off in the end

    @blakeyrat said:

    That doesn't make sense to me. You can't fit a 60 minute BluRay-quality intermediate render on your RAM disk. Unless you put those scare-quotes around "bluray" for a very good reason, and it's really "DVD quality at best maybe". Or you're rendering in 10-minute segments, and even then it'd be tight.

    when was the last time you did a two pass video render? the first pass generates very coarse information, nothing like a video file. It's basically a table of hints to the next pass so that the second pass that actually generates the video has some knowledge of what's coming next and can tune the output encode better

    for a 20GB output file (1080p29f 90 minute duration video) will generate about a 4GB intermediate data file.



  • @accalia said:

    photoshop.

    WHOA A PRODUCT NAME MY MIND IS BLOWN!!!!!

    @accalia said:

    when was the last time you did a two pass video render? the first pass generates very coarse information, nothing like a video file. It's basically a table of hints to the next pass so that the second pass that actually generates the video has some knowledge of what's coming next and can tune the output encode better

    for a 20GB output file (1080p29f 90 minute duration video) will generate about a 4GB intermediate data file.

    It'd been awhile, but I recall the intermediate file being larger than the final file. But that was in Vegas, not some shitty Adobe piece of crap shit puke ass. And I haven't done it in ages because YouTube's re-rendering massacres the quality anyway.


  • FoxDev

    @blakeyrat said:

    But that was in Vegas,

    never used vegas. and honestly i wouldn't be using CS5 except that it was bought for me by my previous work (why? NFC but they did buy it and i'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth.... i was still happily using Photoshop 7 at the time, never saw the point to pay fpr the upgrade. still dont.)

    @blakeyrat said:

    And I haven't done it in ages because YouTube's re-rendering massacres the quality anyway.

    i've noticed. that's why i render in ultra quality.

    i'm not currently uploading to youtube, but the test renders show that at least with the current reencoder the ultra quality encodes result in better reencoded video.

    and if not, what the frack ever. i'/m doing this for fun anyway.



  • @accalia said:

    never used vegas. and honestly i wouldn't be using CS5 except that it was bought for me by my previous work (why? NFC but they did buy it and i'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth.... i was still happily using Photoshop 7 at the time, never saw the point to pay fpr the upgrade. still dont.)

    FTFY

    and if not, what the frack ever. i'/m doing this for fun anyway.

    That's a weird way to escape an apostrophe.


  • FoxDev

    @chubertdev said:

    FTFY

    thanks. you decided to leave "fpr" unfixed?

    @chubertdev said:

    That's a weird way to escape an apostrophe.

    i'm a weird fox. ;-)



  • @accalia said:

    thanks. you decided to leafe "fpr" unfixed?

    I thought it was a weirdly accented "o"


  • FoxDev

    @chubertdev said:

    thanks. you decided to leafe "

    ... i think it's time for me to stop typing....



  • Blakeyrat - Hitting 64GB or even 128GB is not that hard....just think virtualization [I currently have 32GB on my laptop, and am looking to upgrade to one that supports 64GB]



  • Yay the CPUWizard is back! But that post wasn't nearly as self-aggrandizing enough, hm. You don't feel even slightly tempted to brag about how great your New York office is, or how many prototype Intel chips you were provided? Maybe... body snatchers?



  • Blakeyrat, you're not keeping up [hint, I moved out of NYC over 6 months ago!!!!]... but more seriously, I would actually have expected you to be making reasonable use of virtualization and those VM's do chew up RAM (if you want them to be effective)...

    Now in the unlikely event that something productive could come of this...do you have (or know directly of) any experience with some of the newer laptops that do support 64GB...most of what I have heard is that they have various problems (power, thermal seem to be the most common)



  • @TheCPUWizard said:

    but more seriously, I would actually have expected you to be making reasonable use of virtualization

    For what?

    @TheCPUWizard said:

    Now in the unlikely event that something productive could come of this...

    Well you're just as dumb as before.



  • @TheCPUWizard said:

    Hitting 64GB or even 128GB is not that hard....just think virtualization

    Yes, running multiple VMs simultaneously is going to chew up RAM.

    However, outside of multi-tenant servers, that's not a very impressive statement. That's like whining about an annual salary of $10 million being too low because you have to buy a new Agera every couple months.



  • I also have 24GB for the VM-s. I think at one point I had this much RAM and no SSD. And even then, I still wouldn't use that DIMM-drive thing.

    That said, @blakeyrat, if you ever need to shuffle multiple VM-s (perhaps to do your much beloved usability testing), you'll realize 8GBs won't get you very far at all.



  • @cartman82 said:

    And even then, I still wouldn't use that DIMM-drive thing.

    I wouldn't blame you. This Dimmdrive appears to be made for dimmwits.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    I think it's a given that any PC gamer who sees any appeal in a product like this is stupid. Probably an asshole, too.

    Well, it might be... somewhat advantageous to preload all assets into memory when the game loads, instead of having it load between levels? It won't save you any time, but it won't disrupt your gameplay if the game tries to pull shit like Sonic 06 did.

    Maybe. I dunno.

    @blakeyrat said:

    It's probably 24 more than you need. I mean I don't know what you do with it, but my machine has 8 and I have trouble giving it any memory pressure at all. I think once I hit 60% active memory usage.

    Maybe, but then again, RAM is cheap as dirt. And I'm just talking out of my ass here, but I suppose a well-written say, web browser could take advantage of more RAM by caching more stuff in-memory instead of on disk.

    8GB is probably enough if you have an SSD for those few times that it isn't, but with an HDD you really, really want to avoid paging. Heavy I/O pressure can grind you to a halt.



  • I can think of a game it may actually have some use for: Arma. Since it really likes to stream stuff from the hard drive I could see a benefit there. For Call of Duty? Eh, really not so much...


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    Minecraft seems to benefit from being run from a RAM drive, because it does a lot of writing to the hard drive and is poorly written. Because of this it tends to have regular lag spikes every couple of seconds as it saves world changes back to disk. Writing to RAM instead eliminates the lag spikes because there's no wait.

    That's kind of a special case, though, and doesn't really carry through to most situations. An SSD is pretty close in speed but then you're constantly writing to the SSD and who knows how good that is?



  • @blakeyrat said:

    I'm always amazed at what YouTube users think is "acceptable quality" when it comes to video.

    I doubt they've given "acceptable quality" any thought whatsoever. Or "editing" for that matter.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @FrostCat said:

    An SSD is pretty close in speed but then you're constantly writing to the SSD and who knows how good that is?

    For a modern SSD? Probably just fine: http://techreport.com/review/27436/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-two-freaking-petabytes

    The first sign of unreliability popped up in one of their six drives after ~300TB of writes. The first out-and-out failure occurred in another drive at ~728TB of writes. Two of their six are going strong after 2PB of writes.



  • @FrostCat said:

    That's kind of a special case, though, and doesn't really carry through to most situations.

    Yes, pretty much like with Arma. To elaborate a bit on that, it is a game with the environment so big all of the assets may not fit into the 32 bit memory space. Before 64 bits were a thing they bypassed this limitation by trying to keep as little assets in the memory and loading them only when required. This means that as you're driving or flying around, certain data (buildings, trees, etc.) are being constantly accessed from the hard drive which can lead to stuttering and textures popping in.

    I guess if you don't have an SSD but do have a couple of spare gigs of memory you can keep the most commonly accessed files there, basically supplementing for what Windows would do if Arma was a 64bit application...



  • @blakeyrat said:

    some Linux with shitty memory management

    You often toss in this little aside when you're in full Windows Vista+ Memory Management Is Glorious spate, but I have never had any clue what you could possibly be on about. If you can provide actual numbers - or even a vaguely coherent argument - in support of the claim that Windows MM performs better than Linux MM for any given use case, I'll be amazed.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @flabdablet said:

    If you can provide actual numbers - or even a vaguely coherent argument - in support of the claim that Windows MM performs better than Linux MM for any given use case, I'll be amazed.

    Blakey doesn't provide citations. Merely requests that everyone else does - he's apparently exempt from this apparently unusual requirement....



  • @PJH said:

    Blakey doesn't provide citations. Merely requests that everyone else does - he's apparently exempt from this apparently unusual requirement....

    Wouldn't it be a waste of time to look for sources if you are at all times and under all circumstances absolutely correct anyway?



  • @flabdablet said:

    If you can provide actual numbers - or even a vaguely coherent argument - in support of the claim that Windows MM performs better than Linux MM for any given use case, I'll be amazed.

    The actual mechanics of the memory manager are probably no better or worse. (Well, except handling the "out of virtual memory" case, where Linux's method is criminally idiotic.)

    What makes Windows superior is its aggressive, intelligent and proactive disk caching. Which practically guarantees (after watching your behavior for a few days) that what you need is in memory when you need it.

    Linux has nothing like that. Also the Linux community are full of the kind of idiots who complain that the OS is using "too much memory". So I'm guessing most of them don't really have a firm grasp on how a quality memory manager is even supposed to work.


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