Hey Subscribers!

Here's the FAQ in video form, and you can watch Veelicious and I struggle to build a computer in a case that's like 2CM too small in every direction which makes it way harder than it should be! Done now though and it's lovely, functional, and doesn't make a sound unless I'm doing something CPU intensive.

Click here to check it out!

Boring details about our main computer and why we did a computer upgrade (Skip this if you're not a huge computer nerd it's kind of just a rant about technology):

For a couple months now I've had random blue screens. What I found worked to prevent this was to lower the power requirements of the computer, so I clocked down the RAM a little bit and I disabled the boosting feature of the chip. This worked OK, but I still crashed from time to time. A couple weeks ago the power supply started making a horrible whining noise, and all my fans were stuck on their highest speed. This crossed the line for me and I decided I'd try a new power supply as that seemed to be the main culprit (the motherboard or CPU could have been bad with some of these symptoms, too, but I speculated it was the PSU because of the weird noises coming from it.)

If you've looked for computer parts lately: Holy shit there aren't any. When it comes to power supplies, there's only the very low end and the very high end available right now. Nothing against "Great Wall" brand power supplies, I'm sure they work fine, but given that this is my primary work computer I wanted a nice power supply with a good warranty. I use this computer at least 12 hours every day, so downtime on this would really screw me over. A 1000 watt EVGA was the only one I could get sent quickly, so I got that one. My actual draw is between 500 and 600 watts maximum, so I didn't need that, but seriously, there are no freaking power supplies.

While sitting there I was like "Well... what if the CPU's janky, too? Let's get that, also." The AM4 socket still supports the latest chips, and I have a somewhat high-end x370 board, so I figured I'd go crazy and get a 3900x as they just dropped the price and I suspect my x370 has good enough power regulators to handle it even though they're above the spec. No PCIe 4 and no "Precision Boost Overdrive 2.0" but I'm seeing an almost across the board 100% performance increase at a minimum over the 1700x that was in there. That gives me high-end intel single-thread performance for game testing here, but still the tons of cores for actual work stuff that I do. The 3900x seemed to be the best choice, as the 3950x is only really better in multi-threaded operations with a basically equivalent single-threaded performance. Besti, as a consequence of Unity's underlying design and like most video games, can only address 4 CPU cores when I write something threaded (like loading a new scene) and even then, most stuff still only happens on one CPU core. This is why for "Gaming" setups, single core performance on PCs is still very much the king of stats. This will probably change eventually, and IDtech7 (Doom Eternal's game engine) figured out how to thread the main program code. It's just a matter of time before that goes into other game engines.

I figure I'll upgrade the rest of the components on the next generation release. Specifically the motherboard, storage, and GPU, which are all from 2017. The thing that drives me crazy is that the 1080TI card I have now still feels and behaves super fast, but I feel like when the 3000 series comes out it will probably justify doing it. That way we can do stuff with RTX (at present that's still a shit-show in Unity but they're working on it every day) and I suspect there will be more saturation of raytracing-capable cards in the wild. Doing it right now would be a toy for at most 5% of people, but I think in a year we might be more like 25-30% (assuming Nvidia does a good job with the 3000 series.) Enabling RTX requires completely re-writing every single shader in use, and hilariously, Nvidia's fluid shader does NOT work with RTX, so it's very much a nontrivial effort right now. That said, I made Besti X super modular just so we can do these types of things without re-writing aspects of the core system. Absolutely nothing in Besti X is written against a specific API or technology, and instead, everything is written against smaller independent handler programs that I wrote that act as go-betweens between Besti and APIs/hardware. To add something like a new renderer, I just need to alter the handler to deal with it instead of some major system. Every day I'm happy I did it that way even though it does make everything take longer to do.

END COMPUTER RANT

Anyway! Enjoy the video <3 More cool stuff coming on Monday!