@Psycogeek thought you were taking a piss out of me for having referred to it as DD when it's actually dd

it's a raw FIFO program, you tell it the FI and the FO and off it goes

very old school

@JimmyHoffa nope, i was trying to understand what you were saying (way back there) as it floated rapidly over my head.

@BenBrocka How about MySqeel ?

@JimmyHoffa and back here, what is meant by embeds? the partition tables be they on a MBR or on a GPT block thing are on the hardware, they are stored on the disk iteslf.

:V

@Psycogeek A file system embeds information in it's structure, file names, sizes, etc etc, I'm curious if the NTFS file system itself embeds it's partition size in it. It would be redundant because as you said the drive has a couple header spaces outside of the file system start that identify that information, but that doesn't mean the designers of NTFS didn't decide to put their own partition header declaring that information as well inside the file system or throughout the file system

just because some data would be redundant never stopped many people (I'm looking at you OLAP designers) from writing it again ... and again ... and again

(ok, well you OLAP guys have good reason but still..sometimes it's a bit much)

@JimmyHoffa I don't think so

@JimmyHoffa Oh well it gets all to complicated for me. Cause they left a MBR even though there is a GPT, and i can imagine the problems that would (and has) caused.

the partition table itself stores information about the size of partitions

@allquixotic I know that, doesn't mean NTFS doesn't also store it. but I'm with you on the "I don't think so"

it would just seem silly and not helpful

even without NTFS saying "I'm on a partition of XYZ size", it still keeps track internally of where, in disk blocks, each of its sections starts and ends: the partition boot sector, the master file table, the data nodes, the directory entries, etc

you could quite easily derive the NTFS system's start and end by just finding the highest "end" block and the lowest "start" block for any given section

@allquixotic Yeah I know that, the reason I'm thinking about it though is just for what I said right there

@JimmyHoffa well if you're going to move an NTFS partition from a partition that's larger to a partition that's smaller, you need to use a utility that specifically can "non-destructively" resize NTFS, by knowing details about the FS to prevent it from losing data

Not so much concerned with the capabilitys so much as "if the filesystem doesn't declare information about its hosting partition, it should be ok getting moved to another partition"

if you're going from a smaller partition to a larger one, dd should "just work"

@allquixotic Cool, that was my figuring. Should I format the new partition first so it has an NTFS block-structure or do you think the orphaned space beyond the input partition will be just fine being blank-unformatted space ?

obviously I'll declare it in the partition table with fdisk (good old fdisk, I loathe to hear anybody say it's not still the best way to design your drives partition table)

but I was figuring I wouldn't bother formatting it

@JimmyHoffa umm... actually... look at 0x28 here

so NTFS keeps track of the total number of sectors (in Linux we'd call them blocks) that the volume takes up, and it won't use any space outside of that

@allquixotic ah cool

so you could have a 5 GB NTFS partition inside of a 500 GB partition (the partition boundary being determined by the drive-level MBR or GPT data at the very beginning of the disk) and the NTFS volume would only do its I/O inside of that 5 GB

@allquixotic so I'll write it to the partition, windows might get slightly confused by the partition tables incongruence with the file system but ideally that will just mean I'll boot to safe mode and do a disk-resize to make it expand the NTFS all the way out

But yeah, no 6 core Haswell chips yet, right? Or do we expect one soon, I'm not really up on product cycles

there was actually a really weird guy on SU a year ago trying to "hide" a partition in unused space within another partition by doing exactly this

like he wanted an ext3 partition to start with and then "hide" another partition behind it, within the same disk-level partition

@BenBrocka 6-core Haswell (or maybe even 8) will come with Haswell-E, but that's not due for a long, long while; Ivy Bridge-E is brand spanking new, just released this quarter

@JimmyHoffa you're really overcomplicating this

@allquixotic interesting info, thanks for the link. This makes me feel more confident that NTFS unfortunately does know and care about it's partition size, but it does so in so far as it declares "this is my size and I don't bloody care what the partition table says"

boot up SystemRescueCD, type startx, then type gparted and use gparted to "move" and "expand" the NTFS volume into its destination

@allquixotic gpartd can move a partition across drives?

I haven't touched a gpartd boot disk in ages

@allquixotic I noticed Ivy has all the higher core count stuff. Not sure an extra couple cores (and the price difference) is worth older hardware + non-future proof motherboard, since haswell's successor will use the same socket

@JimmyHoffa gparted, not gpartd

(just making sure you aren't confusing it with something else)

@allquixotic see, like I said, it's been a while

technically the operations you would perform in gparted would be (1) "copy" the partition as-is without modifying it from the smaller disk to the larger disk, then (2) "grow" the partition on the new disk to the desired size, which basically tells ntfs the new desired size

I used a live CD with it to resize some NTFS partitions years ago so I know what you're talking about. Didn't realize it would cross drives

a non-destructive shrink is a lot riskier and takes longer than a non-destructive grow

@allquixotic of course

grow is basically saying "Hey, NTFS, you have a lot more space to work with now!"

@BenBrocka The E was particularly interesting in that i knew that a On-Die GPu would not serve me any purpose, and an onboard video (backup) would be a btter safety item. Without the useless to ME onboard gpu and with more actual processing capabilty. plus a "safer" way to see (like bios) if i need backup viewing capability. Between the board costs and the chip costs, I bailed on that idea.

I might still have that old gparted CD around..

@JimmyHoffa gparted.sourceforge.net/…

!!tell 11863150 no

if it's old, you do not want to use it

good point

any ideas regarding gparted + windows 8 ? no issues presumably?

an old Linux-based system, where "old" is defined as "older than 2 years", is about as old in Linux-evolution terms as uncovering a skeleton of a Homo Erectus from ~150,000 years ago

I tend to prefer doing my windows drive alterations in windows, it just makes windows happier

@Psycogeek I was wondering about the on-chip graphics. They do me no good with a dedicated card, right?

"Built on NT Technology" -> "Built on (New Technology) Technology" -> "Built on New Technology Technology" -> :|

@JimmyHoffa as long as you aren't using full disk encryption, it should be fine

@allquixotic Well done, I had to double check your dating on that :P

@Mr.IDon'tCare this is the part where you start trying to dodge imaginary birds right?

@BenBrocka well, not exactly, it depends on whether you can get a motherboard with LucidLogix Virtu MVP that works, or if you are going to heavily use OpenCL or QSV on the CPU (with or without Virtu MVP)

@allquixotic theguardian.com/science/2013/oct/17/…

It's settled then, thanks @allquixotic I'll just grab a gparted CD when I get home, pop my new drive in and make the happy.

@JimmyHoffa Well unless NT stands for something different that I don't know, saying "Windows is built on NT Technology" when NT stands for "New Technology" is kinda confusing, since you basically repeated "Technology" twice.

@JimmyHoffa I strongly recommend the actual SystemRescueCD

@BenBrocka They do me no good :-) other people have many possible uses for them. Crappily procssing video VERY quickly, using the gpu can still be done even if you do not use it as a GPU. and without it most of the boards that use it have No onboard grafics, if your gpu should croak.

@allquixotic OpenCL would be lovely but I don't think most of my video equipment makes use of it

@allquixotic Wassat? gparted + goodies ?

@JimmyHoffa well, gparted is more of one of many useful tools available on SystemRescueCD, whereas the gparted live CD is basically "this is gparted. if it doesn't help you, you're kinda SOL."

Wouldn't openCL use my real GPU not the onboard one though?

@BenBrocka Not necessarily

@allquixotic Yeah, but I don't need the rescue CD... I always have my ubuntu boot CDs around for more featureful rescues when I need them (such as the rescue feature of booting, going online, downloading and burning that SystemRescue thing) heh

@BenBrocka OpenCL has the concept of an ICD, Installable Client Driver -- the core OpenCL DLL reads some registry keys to figure out where the OpenCL implementation(s) are on the system, and dynamically loads them

when you install the Nvidia/AMD graphics driver, it puts one ICD on the system, then when you install the Intel graphics driver, it puts another one on

any sane OpenCL-using program gives you a nice dropdown list letting you pick the implementation to use

modern linux installer discs are like macros over the homoiconic S-Expression known as linux O_O

@BenBrocka Sony Vegas Pro uses OpenCL extensively, and lets you pick which OpenCL device to use

@allquixotic That's part of the problem, I'm not sure I HAVE any sane OpenCL using program...maybe handbreak or?

I currently use Camtasia, Handbreak, OBS and my capture card's lame built in-software

incidentally, Nvidia is horribly slow at OpenCL, but Intel GPUs are very very power-efficient at doing OpenCL (per-watt compute power is awesome)

@Psycogeek Isn't that a good thing? I mean: 1) Your already have a dedicated GPU. 2) You do not want to pay for things you do not use. 3) You are using your on-board GPU and not the onmotherboard chip.

Next GPU will probably be an AMD 280X

@BenBrocka not sure about Handbreak, I think it does some OpenCL stuff, but the real king of OpenCL GPU encoding is Sony Vegas Pro

Camtasia is talking about adding OpenCL but they're glacial in pace regarding upgrades

@BenBrocka ah, AMD's cards are quite good at OpenCL, better than the Intel... although if you are doing live game capture, you could let your AMD card only focus on rendering the game, and use Intel QuickSync Video on the Intel GPU to encode the video

ideal situation would be to use Bandicam to capture because it can use QSV or AMD APP SDK or NVIDIA CUDA depending on what you have

@allquixotic Does any recording program use OpenCL though? I don't see mention of it in Fraps. UNless Sony Vegas captures too

Is bandicam better than Fraps? I find fraps to be...fussy at best

Oh you clicked out? Better end the recording silently

@BenBrocka Vegas doesn't capture, and I don't know of any DirectX/OpenGL capture programs that use OpenCL, but OpenCL isn't the only way to use the Intel iGPU for video encoding

@Hennes right for my uses a Really good GPU card item, which has all of the features i need of the on-die item, is better. then the CPu can be a freaking cpu , like old school. this combo is great for laptops. On the other hand my boards have always had a backup video capability, when the gpu is not there.

Also Fraps locks me at 30 FPS even though I explicitly set the option to not do that

@BenBrocka well, the main advantage of Bandicam is, if you have a supported GPGPU encoding platform (AMD VCE, Intel QSV or Nvidia CUDA), you can encode directly to H.264 in real-time, instead of capturing FRAPS at ~3 GB per minute (or whatever ridiculous rate it is, depends on your FPS and resolution)

problem is, telling your AMD card to both render your game and encode H.264 at the same time is putting a lot of pressure on the card's resources (bandwidth, scheduling, etc)

which is why I was saying, use the fixed function H264 encoding pipeline built into a mainstream Intel CPU (Ivy Bridge or later) in QSV, to do your live H264 encoding, and play the game on the AMD card

bandicam.com/support/tips/intel-quick-sync‎

@allquixotic That is interesting then

granted, for raw CPU throughput, a mainstream Ivy or Haswell won't touch an Ivy-E or Haswell-E when it comes out, or probably even a Sandy-E from ages ago.... but that fixed function video pipeline is quite nice if you can get it to work

Would save me from running Fraps video through Handbreak every damn time too

@allquixotic Does my haswell have a fixed function pipeline?

probably not, too cheap

@allquixotic thats a good idea, 3 processors no waiting :-) which just leaves the heat issue, of your already pushing the CPU to its max.

Camtasia does not play nice with Fraps recordings OR my capture card's output. Handbreak is handy but it's an extra step I hate

@BenBrocka eeeeeeeexactly. besides, live encoding to H264 reduces your I/O write load, which means the game should load/save faster than it would with the FRAPS uncompressed write load

@JimmyHoffa I already looked it up on ark when you ordered it; it doesn't have QSV, even though higher-end Haswells do

it's just too low-end to have it

Ah well, my gaming performance as I saw last night is significantly improved

@allquixotic I've been recording to a different drive anyway. That might change if I start actually using my external drive as an external backup though

@BenBrocka recording to a different drive doesn't really help; you're still using all that memory bandwidth, all those interrupts and context switches, all those FS writes... Bandicam doesn't write anything to disk until it's processed to H264

@allquixotic That is a concern of mine; but I'm not sure how much I'll notice the six cores in most games. And Camtasia uses at most 4 cores, though other stuff can use it

Damn, bandicam is only $40? I'll have to try it

so with Bandicam, the data flow goes: read from the GPU framebuffer into main memory; send a series of frames to the Intel iGPU for fixed function encoding to H264; copy the H264 data to main memory; then write the H264 data to disk

know it lets you record separate audio tracks for mic? That's one of my main qualms with Fraps

h264 all the way sounds sweet as long as it's super high quality/adjustable quality

with FRAPS, the data flow goes: read from the GPU framebuffer into main memory; perform a very fast CPU-based encoding of the frames in memory (basically lossless); and write the uncompressed frames (heavy I/O load) to disk... then later on you have to wrangle all that data down to a more manageable size with another program

@BenBrocka the CPU-based x264 encoder will produce marginally higher quality at the top end than a fixed function pipeline; the video encoding FFPs are optimized for speed... but there's still an adjustable quality slider that trades off between file size and quality

@BenBrocka most peole are indicating that more than about 2 good fast cores are needed for games, 4 should be enough to not even think that any more are needed for any of the games for some time. I want more just for processing, not for games.

it won't be IMAX / movie theater quality, but it should be high enough quality that uploading it to Youtube will make the quality worse (meaning that the source H264 movie would be higher quality than Youtube is willing to host due to bandwidth costs)

@allquixotic I haven't actually noticed the I/O load being a big issue with Fraps. I'm mostly annoyed at having to reencode it before editing, and deleting the 100GB source files when I'm done

@allquixotic yeah, Youtube will be the final quality bottleneck

@BenBrocka I know exactly what you mean; my previous game pipeline involved FRAPS -> disk -> Sony Vegas Pro encoding to H264 using OpenCL on my AMD GPU, which is about 50-75% faster than letting my Ivy Bridge i7-3770K do it

but "0" time with Bandicam is better than ~20 minutes with Vegas Pro...

Speaking of, I've heard people are having to upscale their 1080p videos just so YT doesn't quality-butcher them. That sounds terrible. I have to do that for sub 480p (old games) because it reads "360p" as "murder my quality please"

It's funny because a super-tiny 360p video in pixel-perfect quality will be uploaded and YT turns it into complete trash even when it's <100MB in size

@BenBrocka not sure about separate audio tracks, but if you google, bandicam forums seem to at least have an answer, if not THE answer you're looking for

sounds perfect, actually

@BenBrocka ...Youtube is just weird, let's leave it at that... it's hard to blame your personal encoding pipeline for something stupid that youtube is doing :|

I'm sure they have all kinds of insane pre-processing and analysis they do on input video to determine what to do with them

With my current setup I record game audio in fraps, then record game + mic audio in Camtasia (because I am too lazy to figure out how to do this well in audacity) then I line up the tracks in editing and remove one of the game audio tracks

@BenBrocka wow

that's really cumbersome

Yeah. If I let Fraps record both audio tracks it is COMPLETELY and permanently ruined if game/mic audio is too high. And, get this, I have to manually change the volume Fraps records at every time or game audio is 10x louder than mic. So I pick the awkward but fixable solution over the chance of permanently ruined tracks

Is there an easier way?

Not with fraps really. Using Audacity would use less CPU load, but I'd still have to line up two pairs of audio tracks in post. What fraps SHOULD do is record two audio tracks, or let me output Mic audio to a separate WAV or something

@allquixotic as long as it all works together , in the complicated mess that it is, and damage the game playability and the recording, and have a lesser video encode too :-) If a person needs something like that 2 times out of a few years, the setup time the debugging, and perfecting of it is How Much Effort?

@Psycogeek Better hire someone?

I love making videos for youtube but the editing really kills me sometimes. There is a lot of stuff that can randomly go wrong

@Boris_yo like the people who put 500 videos up on youtube of game play?

@Psycogeek 800 for me...

@BenBrocka you got 800 gameplay videos on youtube?

822 apparently. At least 95% are Let's Play/reviews

Been taking a bit of a break though, partly due to vacation

@BenBrocka Oh well i been meaning to thank you :-) they wont let me comment untill i have my own channel anymore.

Viewership is...frustratingly random

@Psycogeek yeah I heard they have some big changes in comments coming soon

@BenBrocka have you looked at this?

@BenBrocka I watch many lets plays for 2 things. (trailers are trash) to see if i will like the game style. and at times to get past an area i cannot figure out. I can hit the "Like" button, but that is all.

I read that the video quality isn't the greatest on that, though, so you might want to take your chances with Intel QSV

@allquixotic I've got an Elgato Game Capture. It's...okay. Frustrating to use in OBS, occasionally desyncs audio (but not anymore despite no changes?!) but it does it's job okay

Video quality is pretty solid though

I honestly can't tell much difference between it and the real footage (asside from a horrific 3 second delay)

Delay only bugs me when I'm watching it sidebyside with the TV though

I only use it to record consoles though, not the PC

I suppose I could if I ran out HDMI and a splitter, not sure that's a better idea than Bandicam though

!! info no

@Gowtham Command no, created by allquixotic on Tue, 15 Oct 2013 18:35:31 GMT, invoked 8 times

@Psycogeek Yeah Let's Plays make a great makeshift walkthrough when I can't find one. I've always meant to tag/describe my videos better for people looking for that...I mostly play quick, free Flash games though, or little indie games. Much more enjoyable to let's play IMO

I'd go crazy trying to be entertaining while doing a 20+ hour Zelda run or something

@BenBrocka crasy sells :-)

@BenBrocka well the Hauppage does H264 encoding for you right on their hardware, so neither your CPU nor your GPU nor your RAM ever sees the full uncompressed data on your desktop

@allquixotic Yeah, the gamecapture does the same. But I have to reencode it's files

I have no idea what codec they're using, but Camtasia refuses to read it until I Handbreak it

probably just an unsupported profile of H264

Hauppage uses Baseline, which is lower quality but wide compatibility

Yeah. It's lovely compression, but wierd

It even has multiple export options, none seem to work naitive with camtasia

The iPad profiles might work, but it exports those to iTunes which is annoying as hell

video is one gigantic crapshoot overall - the encoders are buggy, the GPU drivers are buggy, the decoders are buggy, the standards are written as loosely as saying "at a red traffic light, you can either stop, OR you can just go ahead anyway, that's fine too"

Gspot is quite good at telling you which codecs are used.

@allquixotic As frustrating as it is, it's kind of magical it works as well as it does

It's pretty amazing when I sit back and look at a video of mine and think "wow. Most people can barely do this using a phone camera"

@BenBrocka we should just ditch all the video formats entirely except for WebM/VP9 with Opus audio -- no patent encumberment, constantly improving hardware support, very good efficiency, less defective standards

now it bugs me when I CAN'T use a capture card. Like my stupid PS Vita and 3DS

Goddamn patents

@BenBrocka capture card doesn't work?

get a View2D splitter :P it strips HDCP

@allquixotic They're portables, so you need to physically attach a proprietary capture card

Nah I got an HDCP stripper

oh

And the PS Vita sadly lacks an HDMI out when the PSP had component out

I don't own a console so the only advantage of having a HDCP stripper for me would be for Netflix, but I don't intend to publish movie recuts or anything like that -- when I do upload to youtube, it's always game footage

and games don't HDCP themselves

(yet?!)

They might. And then you can buy the DLC for HighResOutput. ;-)

PS3 is HDCP for games for no apparent reason. PS4 won't be I think. Doesn't matter anymore though, my $20 hong kong HDMI splitters crack it

oh right, so I just gave EA a new idea for Battlefield 5

make it HDCP encrypted

Not sure HDCP makes any sense for a PC game anyway

If you're going to record it you'll record it on the PC itself, not tapping the wire

Sense (common or otherwise) is not required when in marketing.

It's more IP goonery than marketing

@BenBrocka but HDCP on a computer prevents you from recording it "on the PC itself"

I'm honestly surprised Sony's removing HDCP from games on the PS4. I love their gaming branch, but they're also an entertainment company

it encrypts the video framebuffer all the way through the system to the output

@allquixotic Oh, would it? Huh. I wouldn't have thought it would affect stuff like Fraps

HDCP's a massive joke anyway

it does

try to FRAPS Netflix :P

or Amazon Unbox

I don't even really care about the entertainment part of HDCP. But when it prevents me from recording fair use video game footage...ugh

Well, DHCP is just for movies. It (and HDMI) should never have moved to the PC.

@BenBrocka you know how it is with these people: their first goal is to prevent you from doing anything you might like to do with their content; their second goal is to then learn what things you'd like to do, and let you do them for an additional charge

But I am rather biased. I do not like how apple forces things, but I like their DP options. More than HDMI

Bloody expensive apple

Bloody expensive clippy style "this is the only way. Thou shalt use this"

Bloody nice hardware though

(ok, enough use of bloody)

I'm fine with HDMI. It is SO hackable. Switches, splitters, strippers, capture cards. Can't do that with DVI

at least not that I'm aware of. I haven't tried nearly as hard

uhm. No need to hack DVI. No encryption to hack

Yeah but I can't run 5 DVI outputs to a single input and split that single to two monitors and a capture card

@Hennes except when HDCP content refuses to play to anything but an HDCP device

there's also such a thing as HDCP over DVI

it exists

That is rather exotic usage.

@allquixotic Damn. I did not know that.

It's actually extremely useful for recording

Also switching inputs on TV is a pain in the ass, I prefer my switch even if I weren't recording

might run one monitor on HDMI just so I can split it to the TV. Steam Big Picture on a separate monitor is a massive pain

Big Picture's just like "Oh? Output to your TV? Excuse me while I completely ruin your desktop icons and reorder your monitors"

I just use Steam Little Picture

Does word read ODF?

2010 does

and 2013

I'd be fine with little picture if it were more controller friendly. I suppose I have a fairly uncommon setup with 3 monitors and a TV

!!tell 11864600 orlmente

@allquixotic gosh...

Well, uncommon enough that Steam and Windows don't care about us 3 monitor freaks

@BenBrocka i have 2 regular LCDs and an IPS HDTV I use as my main monitor in the middle

I'd upgrade to windows 8 in a heartbeat if it had something like Eyefinity but with proper window snapping

@allquixotic I'd go crazy with different monitors. IT already drives me nuts that the colors on my 3 "identical" monitors never quite match right

o_O

that drives you nuts?

@BenBrocka how in the world 3 identical monitors have different colors?

@Braiam Different production runs or something

not brought at the same time/shop?

@Braiam As well, different angles, different settings, different outputs

@Braiam Ask on SU and get some rep

@allquixotic You look at your middle monitor. White is white. All is good with the world. You look to your right monitor. White is slightly redder. You scream

meh, those are bad monitors then @CanadianLuke

good monitors are the same doesn't matter the angle....

@Braiam Not all at the same time, no. Plus they're not IPS so the angle is a slight issue. Should have bought them all at once though

Depends on the age

@Braiam they all are bad when none of them know what color they are supposed to be to begin with :-)

IPS didn't have the best input lag when I bought these

have a monitor identity confusion??? O_O

It's just a minor color temperature issue, but it's still noticable if you have white windows next to eachother on two monitors

@BenBrocka I'm pretty sure that's just you. I look at my 2012 32" IPS HDTV, my 2002 24" TN LCD, and my 2006 22" TN LCD and shrug.

@allquixotic The horror

You don't constantly play games that are like "QUICK! Without using a color sensor, what exact RGB value is this color? You have 5 seconds!" do you?

No, but I do design (less than I'd like to though) and edit video so incorrect colors are highly annoying

the color correction stuff just "does what it can" bend this a bit this way, bend that a bit that way, there is no infinte color, so there is no infinte color correction.

"I do design (less than I'd like to though)" charge higher, then buy 3 good monitors ;)

The only thing I'm envious of macs for is the color quality of the monitors

@BenBrocka sounds like you need a color calibrator hardware device :-)

@Braiam Working as a programmer not a designer is the problem there. I could buy better monitors if I wanted to but I try not to constantly spend money on this stuff (I'm not sure why)

@allquixotic I didn't realize that was a thing you could do. I just mess with the settings on the monitors but it's never quite right

@allquixotic Is that the new thing introduced by Steam?

@BenBrocka pantone.com/pages/pantone/category.aspx?ca=2

Speaking of Big Picture, why on earth isn't fullscreen windowed standard in games yet?

Flash games.

@BenBrocka perf

@allquixotic Ack $100. Not so much that it's not worth it, not so little it's a no brainer

@allquixotic Is it really a performance hit?

@BenBrocka yup, as long as it's a window, DWM does direct rendering redirection, meaning it passes it through a layer of compositing to get the thumbnails that display on the taskbar, and to render "over" the window

a true fullscreen DirectX surface just takes over the video card's framebuffer and there's no compositing layer

it also has fundamental impacts on things like maximum fps, VSync, etc

@allquixotic (on the subject) why does winders feel the need to turn off areo when doing lots of 3D gpu stuff? does that only happen when it it NOT full screen?

some programs are just incompatible with Aero somehow and switch it off automatically

or is areo back there doing stuff when it it isnt even seen?

programs with admin rights can kill DWM (aero) with or without its consent, for one thing

but if the program doesn't try to kill aero, and it requests a rendering mode that aero can't possibly support, like direct rendering to the framebuffer on a window, aero has to suspend itself and go back to scanlines

meaning you scan horizontally each line of pixels from left to right, and if any of them intersect with the window being rendered, you let the window render into that area of the framebuffer/aperture; otherwise you render using the GDI pipeline

giving the window kind of a "black hole" directly into the FB

but aero is incompatible with a scanline model because compositing fundamentally involves each app rendering to an offscreen texture and them being, you know, composited into a scene

that's also why windows with non-rectangular geometry are hilariously inefficient on non-aero modes, and moving them around on the desktop is slow -- because there are going to be a lot of little areas of the aperture that you have to delegate to the window to draw to the FB

with compositing, the window is drawing to its surface, and you already know the geometry, so you just grab that out as a texture and composite it onto the screen

@allquixotic well i had one time where windows tossed up the "do you want to turn it off" . i am wondering if it would be rendering anything behind a "full screen" app that is running?

I keep reinstalling this financial software to test and I Think it installs a little less of itself every time

@Psycogeek you mean "Your system is running out of resources" or some other stuff?

@Psycogeek if the app is true full screen and not just a maximized window without window decorations, it isn't rendering anything behind it

@allquixotic Ok, thats what i would think . I usually dont have aero on, so It is new to me.

@allquixotic except in windows 8 where this occurrence causes a pleasantly blinking blank screen as DWM continually retries to start itself and fails (as I learned due to nvidia drivers that weren't compatible with my rig and DWM), because DWM can't be offed in 8, it's required to display any/every thing

@JimmyHoffa Windows 8 does that? Damn, I'll have to hold off on windows 8 even longer then

...stupid words that aren't words but we use often anyway

@Braiam I was choking the 3d out with some benchmark tests. when windows disrupted the whole thing with a request to turn off aero.

@JimmyHoffa huh, didn't know that

@BenBrocka Well, windows 8 only does that if it can't start DWM for some erroneous reason. There's no turning it off anymore, technically you could but they removed the non-aero mode so without DWM you get no desktop

or screen rather

@Moses Welcome to Root Access chat for Super Users! I am this channel's helpful chat bot. Please don't ask if you can ask or if anyone's around; just ask your question, and if anyone's free and interested they'll help. For bot commands, type !!listcommands

that makes a lot of sense; the non-DWM mode required a stifling amount of legacy code in drivers and in the graphics stack, and everything they did had to take into account both DWM and scanline GDI 2D

I say good riddance -- finally the scourge of software rendering is gone

technically you might be able to replace DWM in windows 8 with your own window manager if you could get it to stop constantly trying to restart itself. It would render blackness and my mouse followed by blinking as DWM tries to take over rendering and then no-signal while it's failing, then it crashes and back to black screen with a mouse until it tries to restart again.

If I could have stopped it from trying to restart itself that black screen + mouse would ahve rendered, then all I need is explorer.exe to have a run box and a window manager to give me open/close

@allquixotic I always had Aero mode off. Presumed it took more resources. Perhaps I'm an idiot. (Ok, I am an idiot)

never knew until I had these issues before that Aero shifted rendering to the GPU

in my case for some reason it consumed all the 512 mb of VRAM that my card has and started using system memory... I just shut the darn thing down...

@JimmyHoffa these days with things like render standby as a feature of GPUs, and with all the advanced rendering we get from browsers and the like, 2D CPU-based rendering actually uses more energy and puts off more heat than letting your GPU hardware composite a few textures together using something like the DX equivalent of GL_texture_from_pixmap

I have nowhere else to post this rant. I'm a sysadmin in a tax prep business. Just had a conversation with an employee who insists that identity theft really isn't a big deal, and never really happens. Therefore, the fact that he is continuously infecting every workstation he touches with malware, is not really a big deal and is entirely my problem. /Rant. Now everyone, empathize with me.

Sarcasm, throughout that last bit, of course :)

generally Aero ==> performance ==> more complicated, dynamic graphics rendering in both 2d and 3d apps ==> more efficient than a CPU rendering the same dynamic graphics (but if we went back to Windows 95 style graphics then a CPU would still be more efficient)

@allquixotic Of course I'm a fan of having rendering always done by my GPU rather than CPU, I just didn't know Aero did that (I just thought Aero meant "Make windows prettier and have more system-intensive effects" while still rendering from CPU)

@Moses sends empathy waves

Thank you, @allquixotic. I feel better now :)

@allquixotic In watts all this extra fun stuff takes a lot more power, not so much the render method but all the Stuff (that might be completly unnessisary) .

wait, he should open the seas of empathy instead, no??

@JimmyHoffa ever since the original introduction of Aero in the Windows Vista preview and RC, it has never done rendering on the CPU, except when applications choose to do it themselves

@Moses You're just saying that, you still feel like mashing the guys face with something large and made of tungsten

basically you can't stop an app from saying "give me a blank window", then go off and calculate the pixels on the CPU and write them to the canvas... you can never prevent an app from trying to do that

but once the drawing is done to that canvas (whether done by GPU or CPU), the copy of the canvas into the framebuffer is done on the GPU with Aero

that's the performance-friendly part

@allquixotic still moronic operations....

@JimmyHoffa I feel like actually infecting his computer and stealing his identity just to teach him XD (Only joking)

@Psycogeek except that modern chipsets' power usage closely follows the user's actions, so if you're just sitting there, your modern chipset will be using a lot less power than an older chipset that has limited power management features

on my ivy bridge system i can hear the CPU fan slightly rev up when i scroll down in Chrome, then immediately drop back down when i stop scrolling

that's the entire system's energy usage and cooling profile closely following user action

you sit there, your system sits there

you do stuff, your system does stuff

before, your system would use a fairly high "idle" power no matter what you're doing

@allquixotic on my overclocked haswell, i can hear the fans all ROAR to 2000rpms everytime i do something :-) still working on the cooling .

@Psycogeek maybe you shouldn't overcock it then ;-)

Filing it in the golden typos.

Along with pubic / public region.

@allquixotic Well at normal it is rather quiet, but who wants normal :-)

@Moses just link him to this

there's no identity theft! EVER!! not even when a major company that the entire public is forced to trust, intentionally sells your data to thieves for profit!

I want Both, the high (not highest) overclock and the silent pc in one. Not many places cover both at the same time.

I'm pretty pleased with my GPUs overclockability. EVGA PrecisionX software for it is pretty nice

i got a free upgrade to a more expensive hardware part by flashing a new firmware on my GPU :D

Radeon HD7970 stock -> HD7970 GHZ edition

@allquixotic haha and by "free" you mean "in violation of TOS"

@JimmyHoffa um, no.

really?

it's actually endorsed by AMD

AMD wrote the damn installer for it

haha that's just ridiculous.

lol

@allquixotic sure, i can do that too, but what do you do when it starts to get old and break down ? then you need to boot to it at a slightly lower clock?

how do they expect to sell any more GHZ edition models then? lol

@allquixotic that's actaully really cool of them

@Psycogeek by the time it's getting old and breaking down, I'm going to be on the next gen GPU ;-)

It better to not have locked things in, with no return

i upgrade every ~2 years

@Psycogeek dual firmware board -- I flip a switch (shall we call it a jumper for old school's sake? even though it's not a technical jumper, but a switch?) and it goes back to the factory firmware

@allquixotic But you have to have the hardware operational to get to the switching (in some cases)

@Psycogeek even if I were to melt the GPU, I could still flip the switch as long as the whole board doesn't turn to mush -- and if that happened I'd probably be more worried about my house burning down than returning my product for warranty service

What's with the influx of nostalgia games? There's a new Rise of the Triad? and a new Thief?

@JimmyHoffa it's real simple dude: people are running out of ideas to make games off of

'bout once or twice a year you see a truly novel game

the rest of the year it's all "more of the same"

@allquixotic whats a warrenty :-) I think i screw up the warreny about 2 days after i own something and change one thing.

Ah. Well those were both great games, but iduno, by modern standards they were a bit simple, I can't bring myself to bother

@Psycogeek exactly, and warranties these days are basically like this -- "if anything happens, we're not responsible, unless you can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that it came out of the warehouse with that problem"

Wonder how many people would push the button to send raw power into a haswell chip defeating its thermals and onboard voltage control, then turn around and try and get it replaced :-(

knowing i will be paying for that.

@allquixotic "at which point we reserve the right to plug our ears and say 'we didn't hear you, can you please repeat that' until you realize it'll cost you more money in stamps to continue the correspondence than actually replacing the device yourself"

arg... I know I have said this rant before, but... I. HATE. FLASH!

I could throw the board for the dog to catch it 4-5 times , put it in a case and fire it up. But now with these new fragilities on them i only get one dog toss , and its the end of it :-)

@allquixotic on an entirely different topic regarding something you said yesterday; your CS education did not "prepare you for FP" only in so far as it didn't teach any of the fundamental underpinnings of modern FP abstractions. But that doesn't mean they're hard, I've talked to a variety of folks with masters and phds in math who had zero familiarity with the category theory stuff; it's just a matter of nobody teaches it, not a matter of it's too difficult to learn.

</people-should-learn-real-fp-rant>

@JimmyHoffa yeah, but I don't learn things very well without knowing the whole story; I was clueless at OOP until I linked it up with graph theory / set theory

I'd have to learn mathematical category theory and master it to really get a hold on fP

@allquixotic Nah, there's a lot of fun things to be learned in that stuff, but until you try the basic FP stuff you won't realize you really don't need any of those underpinnings to write real fp; the key isn't about the theory stuff so much as it's about declarative coding rather than imperative and you don't need theory to do declarative, you just need to learn to think in a different abstraction

The abstractions you get from the category theory all grow from the declarative approach, learning the declarative approach (no-assignments, no-statement-sequencing) is very beneficial and not difficult without touching any of the higher abstractions. Plus it lays the foundation for those later

Cool. You can use <!-- comment here --> in posts.

@Hennes yeah it's an interesting semi-secret-messaging thing people do sometimes. You edit someone's answer to add a comment so they get a notification but passers-by don't see the comment without digging into the edit history

I got surprised by a comment from someone named awe on an answer to a post from 5th april 2013

@Hennes I had to add some of those to prevent my post from being changed their meaning ;)

I edited it, added information and then got improvements from Scott and an accept from the OP

U MAD?

@jokerdino University of Madison is excellent!

nextofwindows.com/… Ok, then 3 pages of comments of people saying they did disable it :-) and they are either better off, or same, or minimal impact.

where are all the "OMG i disabled it and my computer drop to a crawl, and all my apps take more than 1 second to open now" Dont do it !

In theroy :-) this is an amasing technological advancement combining an AI with an endless process of trying to determine what a human will do next. In practice it is another AI .

Its C3PO clutzing around behind you , bumping into things , and asking how he can help youtube.com/watch?v=1rorneEGPso

I disabled it and I found the GUI more intuitive.

Both before disabling it and after disabling it the computer was lightning fast.

@Hennes I tried to convince the landlord that his computer will really benefit from a SSD. He is like "friggen change anything it works fine" (he is still on XP) . Then i say, but everything will open much much faster this way. He proceeds to open everything he uses , you cant blink an eye before it is done loading.

Yup.

Sometimes "fast enough' really means 'fast enough'

Even though we would use more and demand more.

Some people just use a few things (e.g. using the program "microsoft google" and outlooking. (Not using a browser, or a mail program. Email is too hard. They just outlook).

So i toss up a few Extras, thing that i know are going to take some time. Again, everything works faster than he can Get To It to start reading or start changing it. I realised he was right. freaking green drive, old 775 cpu, and nothing he does would benefit Greatly from changing it.