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[Amdahl Cube] A new webapp for understanding gaming hardware performance before you buy
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Registered User admin
Registered User admin
in Indie Games
The mods here were kind enough to let me post about an ongoing project for the PC gaming community. Amdahl Cube is a web app, focused on saving you time when you plan a new rig or upgrade an existing one. Like many of you, I enjoy the more technical aspects of PC gaming - I like talking benchmarks, optimizations, and architectures. However, sometimes you just want to know how well the part and rig can play games. That's where Amdahl Cube shines.
Amdahl Cube should look very familiar to gamers - it's all tiered loot, like what you'd find in Warcraft or Diablo. This is what a sample rig looks like:
Greens, blues, yellows, and purples, which represent the performance tiers gamers build towards: 1080p@30, 1080p@60, and so on.
How it works
Match the components of the same color, and you get a rig that plays at that level. You can easily find a bottleneck if you see one component is from a lower tier than the others, so it's easy to see what your next upgrade should be.
The components are sorted between the ones that drive performance and the ones that are more functional or aesthetic. Compatibility is managed automatically, with only pieces compatible with equipped components able to be equipped.
Getting more technical
We just launched a new tool for helping gamers get even more insight about their about CPU choices too. You can read more about it here. In short, it's an interactive chart for comparing CPUs, like what you'd see here:
We hope to bring this to GPUs soon.
Caveats
How you can help us
Build a rig and share your comments here. We think this is a really transformative way of building gaming rigs, though we know it is not complete. Let us know if you think this is helpful and something you want more of.
Amdahl Cube should look very familiar to gamers - it's all tiered loot, like what you'd find in Warcraft or Diablo. This is what a sample rig looks like:
Greens, blues, yellows, and purples, which represent the performance tiers gamers build towards: 1080p@30, 1080p@60, and so on.
How it works
Match the components of the same color, and you get a rig that plays at that level. You can easily find a bottleneck if you see one component is from a lower tier than the others, so it's easy to see what your next upgrade should be.
The components are sorted between the ones that drive performance and the ones that are more functional or aesthetic. Compatibility is managed automatically, with only pieces compatible with equipped components able to be equipped.
Getting more technical
We just launched a new tool for helping gamers get even more insight about their about CPU choices too. You can read more about it here. In short, it's an interactive chart for comparing CPUs, like what you'd see here:
We hope to bring this to GPUs soon.
Caveats
- This is best on desktop. We want to be sure things are useful before implementing a mobile version.
- We are using MSRP instead of live pricing. This helped us deliver this faster, but we do hope to offer both live pricing and MSRP views in the near future.
- We are using data from Gamers Nexus. We tried to contact Gamers Nexus to get an OK to use this data but didn’t get a response. We’re not making money off this data, so we hope they will be ok with this. We are going to continue to try to contact them to get clearance, but I don’t want to do anything to upset them. They do awesome work and you should consider supporting them on Patreon.
- Monitors, memory, power supplies, and storage are use generic products for now instead of real parts. Similarly, GPUs are rated based on the stock GPU, not the derivative products sold by manufacturers like Asus and Gigabyte. This is Rob’s fault and he feels bad.
How you can help us
Build a rig and share your comments here. We think this is a really transformative way of building gaming rigs, though we know it is not complete. Let us know if you think this is helpful and something you want more of.
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Yikes, I realized the dimensions were slightly off and updated. The file size seems well below. Need something simpler aesthetically?
It doesn't seem like you've left room in your UI for multiple GPUs. (Or multiples of the same class of part in general, for example SSD + HD.)
VR-tier is represented by white text and a black hexagon. Non-performance-enhancing gear is grey. This strikes me as confusing. I wouldn't expect black/white to be better than blue.
Orange-tier is lower-performing than purple-tier. In Hearthstone (and last time I played WoW), orange is the highest tier and purple is next-highest.
My expectation would be orange > purple > blue > green > white > gray. If you don't want to straight copy Blizzard you could do a rainbow (ROYBGIV) and leave white or grey for non-performance-enhancing gear..
I don't like how I have to pick "core" parts before "secondary" parts. I understand why you've done that from a coding perspective, but it doesn't necessarily fit how I want to build. For example, in my latest build I started from the assumption that I wanted a MicroATX case and worked backwards from there.
Is part compatibility checking supposed to work at all? It allowed me to combine NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX Titan X (2016 Pascal Architecture) with a 430W ATX power supply. NVIDIA recommends a 600W power supply with that card. It also let me put a full ATX motherboard in a Mini-ATX chassis, and DDR3 RAM on a DDR4 motherboard.
Late edit: I don't really understand how parts are sorted in each list. They seem random. On the GPU list, 2016 Titan X is towards the bottom... near Radeon HD 5450. Why?
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Your primary competition IMO is PCPartPicker which means you're going to need to at least match their functionality regarding pricing and compatibility checking. You are offering performance data which PCPartPicker does not offer, so that's a good advantage, but you're trying to thread a pretty tight needle here: people interested in building their own PCs who need color-coded tier lists. Enthusiasts are going to do their own research on gamersnexus/tomshardware/anandtech/etc; while people who aren't into the nitty-gritty of computer builds are going to order a prebuilt from cyberpowerpc/ibuypower/etc or just follow some published build guideline. You're trying to shoot the middle, which isn't always a good place to be.
However, if you can replicate enough of PCPartPicker's functionality regarding pricing and compatibility and add easy access to aggregated performance data, then that might be an alluring combination.
Keep in mind that many PC builders aren't just interested in speed, they're interested in thermal performance too. This is not going to be quite as easy to aggregate, but a possible long-term goal might be to give your users a heat view, too. For example, maybe I click a button and the colors change to blue/green/yellow/red based on how much heat they put out.
Also, people who are colorblind are going to have a hard time with your site. That's only 5% of the population so it wouldn't be a top priority, but you might want to think about a possible colorblind mode for the future. An easy way to do this is use an Ajax dropdown to change the stylesheet to one where tier text ("4K@60") is emphasized.
Maybe you could even just add very blatant tier labels. "Tier 1" "Tier 2" etc.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
We deliberately wanted to get single GPUs right. The number of systems using dual GPUs is so small and the returns are still diminishing. I know enthusiasts love exotic three screen setups, but based on Steam's hardware survey, it's still an extreme minority of systems.
VR tier has been messy and we are considering pulling it out as a tier and making it something else. We experimented with other colors there, but few worked. Based on the pixel requirements for VR, they're very similar to 1080p120 and 1080p144, so we might end up repurposing the whole layer and either using a different shade of blue or picking something else.
We will take that into consideration.
We debated that one for a while. I'm inclined to turn people loose, as I know people may want to start with a Micro-ATX or Mini-ITX case. The big thing holding us back was just developer time in implementing all of the constraints. We will build in basic constraints, but I'm still concerned about recommending a GPU that might be too long for a mini-ITX case, and knowing the internal clearance of all the cases was a huge amount of effort that we wanted to devote to understanding performance.
It's incomplete. There's no chassis or PSU checking. I'm surprised it let you put DDR3 in a DDR4 motherboard, as that check is in place for both CPU and motherboard. Let me know what that motherboard was and we'll investigate.
There's no sorting implemented, which was another sacrifice for getting this beta out. We're going to spend some time on QoL improvements like that, but we were hoping the filters would be sufficient for now.
Let me start with the fact that we love PCPartPicker. They're awesome and have provided a great service to the community in organizing pricing information for discussion and purchase. We view the biggest gap in buying a PC as understanding exactly how a system will perform and how each component contributes towards that, which is why there's so much discussion with PCPartPicker info - gamers aren't sure if that's the best rig for their budget. From our research, it takes gamers over 2 weeks to make a purchase, be it an upgrade or a new system altogether. Those are usually experienced gamers, but frequently not the guys reading every article on Gamers Nexus and Tom's. They just want to play games, not learn why HBM2.0 is on everyone's roadmap and what the optimal number of shader cores are. So we want to deliver that information as quickly as possible. And if we're delivering personalized information incredibly efficiently, it will help everyone.
How will we make money? Affiliate links seem to be the obvious, but our guiding principle is to do what's in the users' best interest that is going to make owning and upgrading a PC as easy as possible.
That sounds a like a good idea, especially adding in noise, which nobody takes into account until it's running in their home.
I'll keep that in mind, I feel bad it wasn't part of our initial design requirements but I do expect it to be a tool for everyone.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Thank you for giving it. I know the hardware community's expectations are always high, so I appreciate the patience and feedback until we get it right.
It works by selecting a CPU and GPU, and you get a "health" bar that represents framerate. The CPU drives the max framerate. GPU drives the actual framerate you'll see at your resolution of choice. Gif example:
FWIW it only has components available for it now in there, as those are the easiest to get framerate data for. If you're interested in more parts or games, let me know.