Month: March 2016

DCS World M2000-C Stream

I tested out the live stream performance of the new build.  It looks so much better then it did before, and I believe I can squeeze a little more quality out of it.

I made a custom mission in DCS World to try out some JTAC bombing runs with a friend.  I setup an AI to lase targets for us to bomb with GBU-12s.

The Mirage has proven to be a wonderful aircraft to fly in DCS World.  It’s not that difficult to operate.  The startup, weapons employment, and just basic flying around are all a breeze compared to some aircraft.  It is not much harder then flying a Flaming Cliffs 3 jet.  The fact I could finally get some AI units to lase things for me was great news!

The M2000-C is wonderful, but it is not meant for ground attack.  The C variant is more of an air superiority type jet.  So, its bombsight is kinda terrible.  If it’s a soft, large, or stationary target, you might be able to hit it.  I could get close to tanks with the Snakeye, but not enough to kill them.  I was 1 for 8 in just being able to damage a T-90.

I was 4 for 4 with the GBU-12s in my first sortie.  The AI JTAC locks onto a wreck for the next several bombs.  I tried to get him to shift targets, JTAC acknowledges it, and it did not work.  In addition to that, my radar key bindings were not working.  It made it difficult to adjust my radar to short range bandits.  It also made me repeatedly die to some antique jets.  Sigh, you can’t adjust the controls in multiplayer..  I think.  So much shit changes with the newest builds, it’s hard to keep up with it all.

Here it is if you’d like to give it a view.  In retrospect I probably should edit out the 1st minute or so, but the transcoding decreases video quality.  I’m kinda amazed the stream looks as good as it does,  I’d rather not mess it up.  Although it wouldn’t hurt to try.

Some Quick Renders

Well, it didn’t take me long to begin fussing with the new hardware.  I’ve tested it out on a good deal of my game collection, and I’ve been loving the added performance.  It didn’t take me long to see how it handled recording, streaming, and transcoding.  It has exceeded every goal I was hoping to achieve.

It took under two minutes for it to render a 48 second 1080p @ 60FPS video.  I’m liking this ratio and I hope it keeps up when I’m finally able to squeeze more video quality out of Sony Movie Studio 13 Platinum (Steam sale buy).

I’ve tested out the new hardware in Open Broadcast Software, and I’m just in awe at how much better it can do video work.  I can now use OBS to record, have it look really good, and not kill my CPU power!  I’m pretty stoked about that, but I can finally live-stream DCS World and not have it look like garbage every time I move my head in freetrack.  Seriously, the pixelation that would happen just looked awful.  I hid most of those streams on Youtube.  Ah well, the latest DCS live-stream looked fantastic and ran just as well.  I could use a better mic for them, but that’s not an immediate concern.  I know it’s important, but it’s not going to happen for a bit.

Anyway, here is my first render on the new hardware.  The footage quality should be improving from here on.  The OBS recordings look a bit nicer in my opinion.

The new build

I finally put all the parts together for my new build.  It’s an i7 4790k with an AsRock motherboard.  The video and sound cards came along for the ride.  I’m waiting for the new NVIDIA cards before I upgrade my old 770, and I still like my SoundBlaster X-Fi Fatality.  It works great with my headset.  I’m sure on-board sound has improved immensely since the old IBM PC days.  However,  I’m old school.  I like my soundcards.

I did jump in head first into the world of the m.2 SSD drive.  I had no idea what these things were when I first saw it on my motherboard.  A close friend of mine asked about them, and I was pretty dismissive of the whole thing.  They were tiny, but I didn’t see any advantage over a SATA SSD.  The read speeds seems about the same.  I only saw them in the 500 MBps range.   My friend looked deeper into it and found an m.2 drive with a 2200MBps read speed.  Read speed has been a bottleneck for as long as I’ve gamed.  Cassette tape drive old school.  This could be a great thing.

I had to check this out for myself.  That kind of speed is amazing, and I’m loving it.  I’ve built a awful lot of PCs over the years, and I never was able to have something for myself that I considered to be the best.  For once I can say that my machine is a fucking beast now.

It loads faster then it takes my keyboard to power up so I’m having trouble getting into the BIOS.  Ha!  It’s amazing!

I finally bit the bullet and installed Windows 10 on one of my personal machines, and I’m not hating it.  I still haven’t figured out how to search for things as quickly as I could in 8.1, but I’m hesitant about using Cortana.  However,  A big thank you to the Microsoft Overlords for the entitlement licenses program.  I like fresh installs, and my Windows 10 install went absolutely flawlessly with the old 8.1 Key.

It’s kind weird how well it went down.  I figure it took me 3 hours from teardown to patching Windows 10 on the new hardware.  Hell, it assigned the drive letters to the old HDs exactly how I wanted it to go down.  I’ve never had a build go so well.

Benchmarks compared to the old i5 build?  Well I figured the m.2 was too radical of a change to the variables.  So outside of comparing the CPU usage, I have no hard numbers to give yet.  DCS World usage is down 50% and the game loads freakishly fast now.  It’s one of the few games I’ll make room for on the m.2 since it doesn’t have a lot of space.  Eh, I’m learning how to offload document, music, and movie data to other drives to keep the m.2 clear for now.  Although I can install a few more things on the SATA SSD now.  🙂

Now I need to see how much it improves transcoding times.  I justified an i7 for moving making, right?  I better put something out!  It is most certainly a good thing I’ve been practicing a lot in the DCS World Mirage 2000-C.   😉  DCS was the the first game I made sure I had working correctly.  HOTAS and FreeTrack (via FaceTrackNoIR) are working well, and I have a working mission with an AI JTAC so I can use GBU-12s to bullseye some T-90s.

As Clint Eastwood said in FireFox, “What a machine.”.  I highly recommend the Samsung m.2 Pro.