Random stuff (2019-07-15)
15 Jul 2019Another busy two weeks, which meant no post last week and only a quick one this time.
RTX 2060 Super
I’ve been waiting to upgrade my graphics card for a little while now, and since the mid-range cards from nVidia and AMD had full reviews last week I finally brought one. The 5700 XT was tempting for a while, given the slight lead in most game benchmarks for a similar price, but in the end the compute and extra features pushed me towards the RTX 2060 Super.
As of the release day reviews, AMDs OpenCL compiler seems broken on the new cards, which doesn’t inspire confidence. I’m sure it will get fixed, but it does suggest this launch was rushed.
On the other hand, there isn’t much difference in game performance between the two, and I do think the RT units will be used in games going forward, it’s just going to take a little while to get used to using them.
I'm going to play around with some neural networks soon, and here the CUDA neural network libraries are what most of the frameworks use, and that’s ignoring the Tensor cores, which should make a difference.
Before the upgrade I grabbed some of the Blender demo scenes and did some quick renders in the Blender 2.80 release candidate. This was only on two scenes (Classroom and Barcelona Pavillion) but these rendered in half the time on the 2060 Super, so that will make things a bit quicker.
Random links
To fill this post out a bit I’m going to end with some links to interesting stuff I’ve found recently:
- PeachPy: A x86-64 assembler written in Python. Could be useful to play around with stuff, especially as it seems to target most platforms and the golang assembly format.
- Ninja Turtles in your network: LAN Turtle 3G. A how-to for red teaming: This like a fun bit of hardware and I’m wondering if I could hack together a simpler version using the ESP modules as the brain.
- Generative Adversarial Networks - The Story So Far: A nice overview of GANs. Lots of interesting stuff in here.