- Those who are in the know, know,
that when it comes to measuring the performance
of a graphics card,
FPS is just part of the story,
I mean, you could have all the FPS in the world
but if you had an extremely high latency,
from your mouse click to the graphics card,
processing it, outputting it
and actually seeing the photons hit your eyeballs,
that wouldn't make for a very good gaming experience,
furthermore efficiency matters,
if you had two graphics cards that performed the same
but one of them sucked back 500 watts
and outputs so much heat in your room,
that you're like gaming like this,
well, surely you'd rather have the more efficient one,
now we've tried a variety of different methods
of measuring these things in the past,
everything from clamp meters for power
to Makey Makeys with high speed cameras for input latency
and sometimes it actually worked out okay
but more often than not,
it required more set up than we can put into,
every single GPU on every single test bench,
fortunately, that all changes today,
meet Nvidia's homegrown tools,
they're calling these the LDAT and the PCAT
and we're gonna see A, if they work
and B we're gonna discuss whether or not you can trust them.
GlassWire is the tool that shows you,
which apps are slowing down your connection in real time,
it's used by security pros to monitor for malware,
block bandwidth wasters and the detects fishes activity,
get 25% off using offer code Linus at the link below.
(upbeat music)
Let's start with LDAT,
the latency and display analysis tool,
it's a rather unassuming looking,
Logitech G203 Prodigy
but wait you need to look closely here,
there's actually a second wire coming out of this thing
and if we follow it down to the end, we find,
a photo sensor.
(upbeat music)
It's embedded in an unassuming looking,
little 3D printed housing
and that wire from the mouse plugs,
right into the front of it, a little something like that.
So then how is this supposed to be work?
Like so,
when you place this puppy on the screen,
it detects changes in light output,
so that means we're actually using a similar method,
to something like the one made by Leo Bodner
but fundamentally different in two ways,
one, instead of taking an HDMI input,
to measure display latency,
we are actually taking a mouse input,
to measure end to end, mouse to photon latency.
Two, it's software controlled from back to front,
so through that, we can set up an auto fire mode,
that is completely unattended,
as long as something on screen changes,
every time the mouse clicks,
we can repeat our tests indefinitely,
to get a reading of potentially hundreds
or even thousands of data points,
within a single minute of testing,
giving us an extremely accurate result,
it even lets us see raw sensor data,
so we can determine where the best place on the screen
is to place the sensor, you guys might not know this
but screens actually draw like this,
not just like randomly, not all at once.
- [Anthony] Yeah dead center is fine,
ideally what it would be is
like say you're measuring a game,
so if it's a first person shooter,
then you would be putting it over the muzzle,
where the muzzle flash would be, then you press the button.
- So why don't we go with my personal favorite,
we'll go with that Cisco.
- You're missing a step.
- Oh, I see.
- There was another cable in that box
and it's still in there.
- Oh yeah, wait what's this for?
- [Anthony] That plugs into the light sensor,
well, let's fire up the program first,
that'd be on the desktop,
it's just in a folder called LDAT.
Oh yeah, it can measure audio as well,
it's got a little 3.5 millimeter audio Jack in there,
so it can measure audio latency.
In theory, you could measure any audio latency with that,
like not even a computer, like a TV or something,
so if you keep it in free running mode,
as you move that around,
there you go, see there was a little luminance change.
- [Linus] Oh look at that.
- [Anthony] So if you put a brighter window over that
or some kind of, anything really, like task manager,
there you go. - Whoa, cool.
- [Anthony] Yeah so you can actually,
set the activation point
for what luminance that should like pick up on
and yeah, it'll just do it, it's super fast sensor.
- That's cool.
- [Anthony] You can also add the mouse button as well
with that second option,
so that it actually will detect when you click the mouse.
This mode is mostly useful
for setting things up the first time and that histogram
is what you get after you get the latency calculation,
now if you wanted to get something,
that's actually a latency calculation,
put the window for a LDAT in front of the sensor,
now click on the window,
like somewhere other than a control.
- [Linus] Oh cool.
- [Anthony] Yeah, so you can just do that, it'll pick it up,
how long it took for it to change,
so what it's doing is it's actually sending the pulse,
to make the click down the cable,
that's connected to the mouse,
it's not actually like using windows
or anything else to make the click,
it's all in the hardware,
so you didn't have to have this software,
running on this computer.
- Not only does this automate the process
and make it so that we can run these tests,
without a secondary PC or like camera capture setup,
it's gonna save so much time, it even exports in CSV form,
which we can then import into Excel
and turn into nice little charts for you guys.
But it doesn't tell us what is contributing,
to the overall input leg, it just tells us the total,
so what we're measuring here is everything,
D bounds, USB polling rate, operating system,
processing delay, driver processing delay,
game engine processing delay, render to display delay
and then finally of course the pixel response time,
all of our display,
which isn't to say though that it's useless
because if we've got this data,
it means that we can change other variables one at a time
and just see if the overall delay gets better
but it's got Nvidia right on the box, can we trust it?
- Yeah, I mean, it's just a mouse
with wires coming out of the button,
that goes into the sensor,
you don't even have to plug it into the same computer,
it has nothing to do with Nvidia,
so yeah, I don't see any reason why not.
- Cool.
All right, how about this other tool?
This is the PCAT or power capture analysis tool,
can tell these are named by the engineers, right,
this is probably the most interesting thing,
I've seen in a long time,
when it comes to measuring graphics cards,
tools to accurately measure power consumption
are not easily accessible being either very expensive
or very rare or even worse both,
methods we've used in the past such as kilowatts,
don't accurately measure power draw
because power supply inefficiencies can creep in,
to say nothing of the rest of the systems power consumption,
during the test,
even worse are the software derived methods,
you might use at home
because A, each vendor has a different idea
of how to measure total board power
and B, you're counting on them to report it correctly,
never go up against the Sicilian when death is on the line,
which brings us then to these two PCBs,
one with a PCI express connector and cartage and another
with a whole whack ton of PCI express power connectors,
as you guys might have guessed,
these allow us to measure the power,
flowing through each of these connectors,
that is both from the power supply cables,
that come into the graphics card
and through the motherboard itself
with up to three, eight pin PCI express, 12 volt cables.
Now on this poppy right here,
we've got a removable OLED display,
that takes both the feed from the PCI express board
and the power interposers and spits out statistics
and the current power draw,
Nvidia claims it's within 0.25% of the oscilloscope
as far as accuracy goes,
so with this we can accurately measure,
what the real world power draw
is for any PCI express card actually
not just a graphics card,
let's go ahead and try it out here,
this is one of those things that as a manufacturer,
you have to have the absolute utmost confidence
in your products in order to produce
because it's the kind of thing that obviously both AMD
and Nvidia have had internally for years
but if you go ahead and you make all these tools available,
to you know every Yahoo,
you know, hardware reviewer out there,
then not just today but for years, forever to come,
they're gonna have the means to hold you accountable
for your crappy products,
so you basically have to think,
you know, not only do I have the best product today
but I'm gonna have the best product forever
and I want everyone to know about it,
to produce tools like this and send them out
'cause I've asked for years, like,
you guys obviously have all these measurement tools,
why don't you just provide them to us
'cause you have them anyway and the answer was always like,
let me get back to you and yet here we are,
this is freaking awesome, how replaceable is this Anthony,
is this just something Nvidia's gonna sell
in their web store or like is it reviewers only?
- For now it's a reviewers only kind of thing,
it's just something that they've kind of built upon,
out of their lab,
that's why you see the 3D printed components
but they haven't ruled out selling it to consumers,
if there's enough demand for it,
so maybe let them know down in the comments,
if you wanna see that,
just make sure that they're on the input side,
versus the other output side and there's a wire on each end.
- All right so (indistinct)
let's just put that poppy, I don't know, like, brilliant,
so they include up to a triple slot
of little (indistinct) that you can screw in here,
to your case, so you can actually mount it securely.
- Apparently it's a standard item for McMaster-Carr,
you can actually just order them yourself,
if you need a different threading for your screws.
- [Linus] Oh okay well-
- Which I think it may actually be necessary in our case.
- We're going straight yellow here boys,
oh yeah, no problem, piece of cake,
oh the display is upside down.
- This is why we didn't give Linus the tools.
- Okay here we go, total power 14 watts right now, dang,
oh, I should plug in an HDMI cable.
- [Anthony] Yeah power use will just probably go up,
a little bit with the HDMI cable then.
The good news is the HDMI cable,
should anchor it to the back of the case here.
- [Linus] That's not a good solution,
what do you work at Linus Tech Tips or something?
What's wrong with you?
- Listen, we deal in junk around here right.
- Of course you're not stuck,
just looking at this little tiny display down here,
as freaking cool as that is,
there's an accompanying PCAT utility view 1.1,
that like the LDAT one can log to CSV files
and additionally provide real time power graphs,
look at this not just total but on a per source basis,
so on our two eight pins here,
you can see we're doing somewhere in the neighborhood
of four watts or so
and then where is it,
yeah 12 volt PCI express,
so that's coming through the slot,
we're doing about four or five watts,
so it's actually equally balanced across all of them,
so then I can just fire up furmark, right?
- Yeah and if you wanted to have all of those,
different metrics on the graph,
there was actually check-boxes,
down at the bottom right there
and that'll just throw them on there for you.
- [Linus] Even just like the windows hardware,
GPU acceleration of the UI,
will give you these little spikes when you do stuff,
like watch, I'm gonna launch furmark and it's 40 watts,
hey, we got to draw this window,
okay everybody calm down now, hey, 250 watts
and I guess we can believe it because that's about,
what we would expect out of a board like this,
this is just power wires,
like it would have no way whatsoever of knowing,
if we have a Radian or a G-Force or a Intel dan, dan da,
not yet but later you know, at some point.
- Yeah, it's completely agnostic,
as far as it's concerned,
it can just measure power from whatever source,
doesn't matter if it's a graphics card or a sound card
or a network card
and just figure out what the power draw is.
- We are gonna be able to do the coolest,
like power draw charts for you guys
and it gets even better because finally both of these tools,
integrate into frame view 1.1 to show latency
and frames dropped by the display
and power statistics from PCAT,
now that the overlay has Vulkan support,
plus we've got integration of these other tools,
there's actually very little that we wish that it did,
that it doesn't already,
direct X nine and 10 overlay next please and thank you.
Let's go ahead and take a crack at this campaign,
so we've jumped to 4k
and we're gonna see how this puppy performs here,
how much power it draws, we're gonna know for sure.
Broken arm, thing in your mouth, boom, broken hip,
you fell off a cliff, take that,
oh, that guy threw a thing at me, don't do that.
Anyway that's not the point today, the point is
we are sucking back around (indistinct) with this thing,
oh wow it's got right, it's got the little display on it,
I don't even have to like alt/tab out,
I can see it, I can see it right there,
I love this, this is freaking cool
and I'm sure that if the price is reasonable,
a lot of enthusiasts,
are gonna wanna get their hands on these things,
come on Nvidia put it on the store.
Today's video is brought to you by the Drop Objective,
two headphone amplifier, aka, the O2 amp,
this amp was designed and created with the feedback
from over 500 Drop members on what they wanted
and serves as an ideal baseline reference amplifier,
powering everything from in-ear monitors to HD800s,
you can adjust the input, output and power arrangements
in two different gains, medium and standard
and it delivers big, clear and accurate sound,
check it out at the link down below.
Okay, what are we thinking for thumbnail.