jlehtone wrote:Was there something about Vulkan? Does the choice of DirectX/OpenGL/Vulkan have any effect on the possible amount of vectorization/threading -- theoretical level?
(Not that it really matters in the OP case.)
On a comparison between OpenGL (ES) and Vulkan:
Vulkan: Scaling to multiple threads
Yes.
mrbadger wrote:...Soundcard: On board sound cards eat up CPU cycles, buying a dedicated soundcard with its own CPU and memory would ease system load and produce better sound quality...
That's something I haven't considered in ages, not since I retired my old "Soundblaster" card. (It was probably a first-gen SB card, too!)
Most of these sorts of discussions about general PC builds and what to pay attention to aren't that different from the early days of home-pc building. I've built countless PCs over the years for myself and friends, so it's all sort of second-nature, a kind of "instinct" about what's important and what's not that important.
Besides all the stuff going on under the hood, new chip designs, sockets, multi-threading, OS considerations, etc, none of the focus in regards to general optimization has really changed in a long time.
The most radical, yet temporary, hardware shift/change I can remember was due to the introduction of the Voodoo piggy-back card, which handled 3d processing separately, taking the additional load from whatever standard card was there. It was... glorious.
(Darn cool name, too!)
Now, all that sort of stuff is on one card, more or less. SLI, is, perhaps, a recent innovation that should be considered, but it's really not functionally different, so doesn't require a lot of re-thinking.
IOW - When is the next, real, radical redesign going to come to the market that actually breaks the mold?
