> On Oct 2, 2013, at 4:59 AM, Stan Hoeppner <s...@hardwarefreak.com> wrote > > This is the limiting factor. And this is why I implore people to buy > the fastest dual core and forgo the quad, six, eight core models. And > in fact, for non gamer daily use, I recommend the single core AMD > Sempron, because a dual core is wasted with Firefox, Thunderbird, Flash, > Adobe Reader, etc. > > I failed to make a convincing case before you purchased Catherine. But > at least you'll now be armed with this information when you make your > next purchase. Financially it's not a huge deal, maybe $50 more in this > case, 10% of the system price, for the quad core. But two cores will > forever be wasted, and that $50 could have gone toward the discrete GPU > you need.
I never suggested you were not correct about the CPU. I observed the lack of utilization of multiple cores on my first dual-core machine in 2006. I got The Haswell for the speed, lower power consumption, and presumably less heat generation. And possible resale value later on. > > > This was my mistake for not asking point blank early in the thread what > res you were running instead of making assumptions based on your retired > status. If I had asked more questions up front we could have avoided > the contention. For that I apologize. No apology needed. You did in fact peg my age correctly; I will be 61 next month. And I too have known people who run less than the native resolution to make the fonts bigger. When I get to that point, though, I will simply increase the font size so I don't get jaggies and blurry letters. Right now my eyes need the sharpness of the image, not a size increase. > > You would be correct if the number you're looking at reflected > application memory usage. But it doesn't. On any of the modern > operating systems one must damn near be a computer scientist to see the > actual memory usage. The 5.22GB, this is on Debian, yes? The system > monitor? This reports process and cache memory usage. The buffer/cache > will literally eat nearly all available memory all the time on Linux, > then free some when an application process needs it. I've never used > OSX but it's probably similar in its desktop reporting tool. This was in OS X. The memory use would be similar in Debian, I assume. About a quarter of the used memory was "inactive" which I assume was the cache. Still too close for comfort for me, as WoW was not running, nor ventrilo, and WoW does background downloads of the almost-weekly patches while you play, so even more processes. > > This will really throw you for a loop. Open a shell window and execute > > ~$ sudo echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches > > Wait a few seconds and see what happens to that 5.22GB number. Then > report back what you find. You can do this while playing WOW as well. > That number will drop like a rock and WOW will keep on going, because > the memory you're freeing with that command is cache. And again, Linux > will eat nearly all RAM for cache if the system is up long enough. It is the nature of *nix to gobble up memory, yes. It will use what is there whether it needs it or not. But my Debian box has not arrived yet, so I can't run that command there. I could try it in terminal on my iMac, and it would probably work. > >> I do thank you for the advice pertaining to a 384 bit bus and a gig more >> video ram than I was planning to get. That is advice that I will be >> following. > > You're welcome. Keep in mind that at 2560x1440 the 7950/7970 may still > not be fast enough for full detail in WOW with GPU settings on high. > The extra GB of VRAM won't get utilized but you need the memory > bandwidth of a 384bit bus. Nobody sells, AFAICT, a 2GB model using > these GPUs. > > I can't tell you where the setting resides, or if you have to edit > xorg.conf, but you will want to use double buffering, not triple > buffering. You'll also want to disable full screen antialiasing (FSAA) > and anisotropic filtering, or set them to very low values such as 2x or > 4x, or play with the settings until you strike the right balance. They > are variable from off to 16x. These are driver settings for the GPU. > They affect the image quality by smoothing the pixels of straight lines > and the edges of objects in the scene, i.e. removing "jaggies", such as > on the ears or dangling hair of characters, the tip of arrows sticking > out of a quiver, etc. Oddly enough, these are also WoW in-game settings. The Mac section of the WoW forum has specific advice on how to set those for every model of Mac that can run the game. > > You may be able to tweak these on the MAC to get acceptable smoothness > from your 6970 as well. GPUs are infinitely tweakable to balance speed > against image quality. I usually have acceptable smoothness, but I might need to tweak my settings a bit more. I was getting lag and jerkiness in the newest raid. I strongly suspect it was my husband giving a piano lesson via Skype while I was in the raid, though. Cg > -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/a2ad88d2-d8ad-4864-a082-716c2a78e...@gmail.com
