User:RhythmicDaze

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Short Bio

Guten Tag! When it comes to me, I love tech. Since grade school, I've always been fascinated by computer hardware and software, finding ways to tweak and meddle with that of which could probably be left well alone (in a working state). Fixing computers and game consoles, sometimes other electronics and appliances, is what I love doing; that's my fun! I'm easy to get along with, patient and forgiving, so you'll never have me yelling at you for a wrong edit or an article not being formatted the way I prefer. Respect is above all the most important to me, and you'll always be treated fair by me.

As for my part in the community, I started helping out here in March of 2013. Mainly, I maintain the Hardware performance page. There, I make sure that users can make proper comparisons between their hardware and user-posted results by making sure the information they add is correct and formatted for readability. It's my first for Wiki editing though I hope my contributions go a long way towards benefiting those who come to this Wiki.

I make editing mistakes too. In that case, if you have tips for future editing based on previous edits I have made, please let me know through my talk page, User talk:Bb 20, or through an email.

I hope you found this reading enlightening! Have a great day :)

Pages I look after

This is here mostly for my benifet ;)

• Hardware_performance
• Hardware_performance/create
• Hardware_performance/entries
• Hardware_performance/intro
• Hardware_performance/nav
• Template:HardwareEntry
• Template:HardwareEntry/doc

My Specs

Component	Model	Comments
Mobo	Gigabyte Z77X-UD3H v1.1	eSATA doesn't work properly :/
CPU	Intel Core i5-3570K 4.3GHz	Stable, no over-volting, even on air cooling.
GPU	Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 4GB (02G-P4-2966-KR)	Sale item, really good buy.
RAM	G.Skill Ares 8GB(2x4GB) DDR3 (F3-1866C(-4GAB) + G.Skill Ripjaws X 8GB(2x4GB) (F3-14900CL9D-8GBXL)	1866MHz, 1.50v
Storage	OCZ Vertex 3 64GB	Bought on sale, great performance.
	Western Digital Blue 1TB (WD5000AAKS)
Optical	ASUS DRW-24F1ST	Use to burn OS disks mainly, rarely anything else.
PSU	OCZ Fatal1ty 550W (OCZ550FTY)	Partly modular. Runs all my things!
Chassis	Corsair Carbide 450 Air	"Borg Cube", best with green led lighting ;)
CPU Cooler	Cooler Master Seidon 120V	Does quite well w/ my OC'd 3570K
Fans	(x3) 120mm	Creates positive air-pressure in chassis

Nvidia tweaks for better gameplay performance

Intro

I have always been interested in tweaking software to have it work faster for me. Overclocking, Windows registry editing, optimization utilities, ect... Those are the types of things that I like to play around with. This nice thing about the Nvidia Control Panel is that you can have profiles per executable that contain different options for how the graphics drivers work with that program. Here, I will show you some of the effects of these profile options when coupled with javaw.exe.

Testing Methodology

Currently, I am using Java JRE 8 to do these tests. However, performance is very similar to that of Java SE 7 Update 40. Also, Fraps is being used to collect these figures. The reason for this is that when you have the debuging overlay enabled while in-game, your FPS drops by a good few percent, a lot of times for me it drops by ~100FPS!

NOTE: Each test below was recorded within 60 second period.

Preset	Min	Max	Avg
With Debug Screen	590	686	657.408
Without Debug Screen	740	809	791.725

If we calculate the percent difference between the average number of frame for both of these results then we come out with a 18.53% FPS difference! I call that a hit, folks.

Results

NOTE: Each test below was recorded within 120 second period.

Preset	Min	Max	Avg
Java 7, Windowed	549	738	661.100
Java 7, Fullscreen	476	617	536.550
Java 8, Windowed	552	842	707.600
Java 8, Fullscreen	486	616	531.967

Preset	Min	Max	Avg
Max pre-rendered = 1, Alt Frame Rendering 2, High Performance, Thread Optimization = ON	563	691	648.892
Max pre-rendered = 1, Alt Frame Rendering 2, High Performance, Thread Optimization = OFF	578	676	637.908
Max pre-rendered = 1, Alt Frame Rendering 2, High Performance, Thread Optimization = OFF	692	795	767.950
Max pre-rendered = 4, Alt Frame Rendering 2, High Performance, Thread Optimization = ON	547	651	618.275
Max pre-rendered = 4, Alt Frame Rendering 2, High Performance, Thread Optimization = OFF	656	807	753.392
Max pre-rendered = 4, Alt Frame Rendering 1, High Performance, Thread Optimization = OFF	688	808	783.000
Max pre-rendered = 4, Single GPU, High Performance, Thread Optimization = OFF	708	814	791.717

Best Settings

Max pre-renderded frames = 4,
Power management mode = ON,
SLI rendering mode = OFF,
Thread optimization = OFF,

These combination of settings above should give the player the best performance overall.

Conclusion

Changing Nvidia Control Panel options is something you will want to look into if you want to squeeze more performance out of your machine. This is great for if you can't immediately upgrade your hardware components, overclock or if your machine can't be upgraded for that matter.

RAM frequency, does it matter for Minecraft?

Intro

This series of tests will determine if low RAM frequency, or and overclocked set of DIMMs for that matter, has any bearing on Minecraft's performance. I'm putting this in here for all you people, but the idea for doing this is to help me figure out if this information belongs on the Hardware Performance page or not. That is to say, just make things more organised, easier to understand and compare against/with without all sorts of useless information! I will be doing a series of tests similar to that of what I did above with my Java experiments.

A note before preceding!

I've mentioned this before, both in my previous Nvidia tests and on the Hardware Performance page, but make sure that when you are benchmarking to not use the debugging HUD whenever possible! The reason I say this is right below:

NOTE: Each test below was recorded within 120 second period, using the same methods of testing as on the Hardware Performance page.

Preset	Min	Max	Avg	Frames
With Debug Screen	453	519	498.642	59837
Without Debug Screen	590	645	618.733	74248

Again, the FPS hit is big, some 21.49% in fact! This is why it is a good idea to use a program, such as Fraps for instance, to collect the frame rate for you. When I talk about consistency, this is a great example of why the same settings for everyone benchmarking Minecraft matters.

Testing Methodology

With the same testing methodology as written on the Hardware Performance page in mind, the only differences as to how I collected these result are as follows:

• Only used default window size
  • I could have done these tests at 2560x1080 or with a maximized window, but I felt that the higher the frame rate I had for each result and using that to compare against other results I created would yield more accurate percentages .. if that makes sense. Also if someone wanted to quantify my results with similar hardware then they wouldn't be restricted to having to use my monitor res to get the same results (one less thing to worry about).
• "Facing: north (Towards negative Z) (180.0 / 0.0)
  • This ensures I will always have consistent results! I should just get everyone to do that, ja? :P
• Always day
  • I didn't want mobs like Zombies and Skeletons suddenly appearing around me should night come, which could potentially affect my frame rate. (That requires testing out though)

Results

RAM Frequency	Min (FPS)	Max (FPS)	Avg (FPS)	Frames (x34)	Frames (x42)
800MHz	563	691	648.892	27947	34032
1066MHz	578	676	637.908	29929	36091
1333MHz	692	795	767.950	31127	37693
1600MHz	547	651	618.275	30290	36694
1866MHz	656	807	753.392	29734	36727
2133MHz	688	808	783.000	30763	37912

Curiously, when I hit 1600 and 1866MHz my frame rate went down. Not sure what happened there, though it looks like the sweet spot is 1333MHz for Minecraft. I'll follow up with more benchmarks (in time).

NOTE: The average frame rate and number of frames drawn per 120 seconds matchup, which in turn means that frames drawn were consistent.

Conclusion

In the end, and I've seen this before with other benchmarks, when I hit 2133MHz I got the same performance as 1333MHz. This means that beyond this there is likely not benefit to amping up your RAM frequency. Although, it looks like increasing your CPU frequency or multiplier can at least do some good!