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Developers, developers, developers, developers

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Legendary Silke

Legendary Silke

[I][B]You like dragons?[/B][/I]
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I can't write write-once DVDs twice, can I? They stay the same as long as they aren't too scratched up.

One errant format is all it takes for an external HDD to lose everything (without data recovery).

At least I didn't write them as CDs. That's like asking for the floppy days!
 
Tsutarja

Tsutarja

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That reminds me, I really like how efficient IE 11 is when it comes to playing flash content. In Chrome and Firefox on my machine, playing any sort of flash content causes quite a bit of CPU to be used, while in IE, hardly an CPU is used when I watch flash content.
 
Tsutarja

Tsutarja

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Team Fail said:
I-- should try that. YouTube gets my CPU up in temperature all the time.
Click to expand...
It sucks now though with Chrome because Youtube forces the HTML5 player in Chrome, and I found that out because the flash player shows up on videos if I spoof my user agent string in Chrome to either Firefox or IE.

Have you tried watching Youtube in IE yet? Is it much faster/less consuming on your CPU?
 

Cordelia

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I haven't noticed any CPU issues with YouTube and Chrome... of course I have a Core i7... maybe that has something to do with it?
 
Tsutarja

Tsutarja

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Yeah, probably :P

All I have on my desktop is a Pentium dual core, but the desktop is also from 2008, which was before Intel came out with the i3/i5/i7 processors.
 
Legendary Silke

Legendary Silke

[I][B]You like dragons?[/B][/I]
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Have you guys also checked whether YouTube is in HTML5 mode in IE9+, too? If done properly, both HTML5 and Flash content should be efficient enough for it to not matter.
 
Legendary Silke

Legendary Silke

[I][B]You like dragons?[/B][/I]
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The beauty of GPU acceleration. Most of the time, it's faster to just use your otherwise idling GPU to do stuff that used to be done on the CPU. How times have changed :)

I like how IE9 was a wake-up call for browser makers to start thinking seriously about GPU acceleration and frame times on the Windows desktop browser market.
 
Tsutarja

Tsutarja

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Hmm, so do Chrome and Firefox use GPU acceleration or CPU acceleration then? I'd assume the latter, because I do have an external GPU after all, but I'm just not too sure -_-

But yes, HTML5 in IE is also smooth, and I'll continue to watch Youtube videos in IE until Chrome allows for less CPU usage with flash content.
 
Legendary Silke

Legendary Silke

[I][B]You like dragons?[/B][/I]
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Zach said:
Hmm, so do Chrome and Firefox use GPU acceleration or CPU acceleration then? I'd assume the latter, because I do have an external GPU after all, but I'm just not too sure -_-

But yes, HTML5 in IE is also smooth, and I'll continue to watch Youtube videos in IE until Chrome allows for less CPU usage with flash content.
Click to expand...

Both Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox also use varying amounts of GPU acceleration, depending on the operating system, graphics hardware, and graphics hardware driver. Most GPUs, be it integrated or external, should be able to handle GPU acceleration with aplomb. Heck, your smartphone is probably doing it provided that it's using a semi-recent mobile browser. As long as the GPU isn't way too ancient (think before DirectX 9 and doesn't have a bad driver), it'll automatically accelerate web content as long as you didn't disable it yourself.

Google Chrome doesn't accelerate much on Windows PCs, though, when it comes to general web content (2D Canvas and WebGL are another thing). Firefox should do it the same way as IE does on Windows Vista and newer, utilizing Direct2D on supported hardware, and hopefully can achieve parity with regard to performance.

The fun thing about GPU acceleration is that browsers do have to have a CPU fall-back just in case the GPU is unusable. GPU accelerated browsing can be finicky since GPUs aren't exactly designed to display web content - they usually operate on complex 3D scenes. Chrome and Firefox fall back to GDI+-based rendering (not accelerated at all since Vista; although it's accelerated in XP, it's going to be slower than Direct3D or Direct2D), while IE uses WARP (a software DirectX 10+ rasterizer, effectively providing a "GPU" without a compatible GPU).

You probably won't notice GPU acceleration unless you have a relatively slow CPU. That's when the benefits of GPU acceleration work its magic - even slow, out-of-date single core smartphones can handle desktop sites just fine as long as it's not running out of video and/or system memory.

Google Chrome uses its own Flash player; sometimes, this Flash player can get buggy.
 
Crunch Punch

Crunch Punch

fire > ice
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Has anyone here done or know someone who have done a Computer Science degree, preferably in the UK? I'm heavily considering taking that path and would love to know any first hand experience on the stuff taught in the course and any other related things. Cheers!
 
Legendary Silke

Legendary Silke

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Scyke'd said:
Has anyone here done or know someone who have done a Computer Science degree, preferably in the UK? I'm heavily considering taking that path and would love to know any first hand experience on the stuff taught in the course and any other related things. Cheers!
Click to expand...

Does part-way through count?
 
Tsutarja

Tsutarja

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I'm also undergoing a computer science degree. Just be prepared for lots of math courses and science courses all throughout your track towards getting one.
 
Legendary Silke

Legendary Silke

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Intel's Next Unit of Computing has me interested. That's a lot of power in a tiny box! If only I could get a Celeron kit where I live, then I'd only need to find laptop RAM, stick my laptop's old disk drive, and have a Linux box.
 
Tsutarja

Tsutarja

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Earlier this morning I installed Windows Vista into a VirtualBox VM for the hell of it, and I got Aero running on it with 1GB of RAM to the virtual machine. Doesn't run too badly at all.
 
Legendary Silke

Legendary Silke

[I][B]You like dragons?[/B][/I]
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Zach said:
Earlier this morning I installed Windows Vista into a VirtualBox VM for the hell of it, and I got Aero running on it with 1GB of RAM to the virtual machine. Doesn't run too badly at all.
Click to expand...

I believe how well Vista runs depends on a lot of factors. But, yeah, 1 GB of RAM should be usable for Windows Vista and a few applications running at the same time.

Sometimes I feel spoiled by 8 GB of RAM on my laptop.
 
Tsutarja

Tsutarja

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I wish I had an 8GB machine :P but then again, my main goal this year for a gadget is to get a new laptop, one that is more portable and more powerful. I know I've said in the past I'd like to have a larger resolution, but I don't really care at this point. I just need a new laptop period.
 
Legendary Silke

Legendary Silke

[I][B]You like dragons?[/B][/I]
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A high resolution display on a Windows laptop means nothing if the apps aren't designed to take advantage of it. This is especially important if you see yourself spending a lot of time in non-Microsoft and non-Windows Presentation Foundation/Direct2D/Direct3D apps on the Windows desktop. This pretty much means anything that comes with Windows, most modern Microsoft apps, games, Firefox, and... well, not much else.

I'd be more concerned on how the display looks. Is it bright enough? (Most should be able to go neon indoors with showroom at the very least.) Does it look mottled? (Thankfully, only Acer can produce screens this atrocious.) Colour calibration issues can be fixed easily after purchase using either Windows or the graphics driver's colour (management) settings.

The funny part is that DPI scaling has been there in Windows since forever. It was on Windows XP; heck, it might have been in as far back as Windows 9-freaking-8, though DPI scaling as we know it was introduced in Windows Vista. (It looks like Vista was just too far ahead of its time in terms of hardware.)

If I were to rank what's most important in terms of a system's performance these days, I'd advise that you put more weight on the storage. Most non-bottom-feeder laptops should have both "fast enough" CPU and "roomy enough" RAM; you should check out on what features the laptops offer, the connectivity options, the display, and, most importantly, the storage medium the laptop uses. Try to go hybrid at the very least - you'll be thankful that they exist, even if they are caching-based. I don't miss traditional HDDs after moving to a 8GB/1TB hybrid.

I'm glad that I got the Surface RT instead of the Acer Iconia something. The latter's display is a horrorshow!
 
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