[sims] Sims Discover

[synaesthesia]

So out of interest, does anyone have a PC capable of running Discover so it doesn't run like a sack of manure?

Not digging too much, but on an uber powerful DDR3 machine on an I3 processor which is already more powerful than any discrete graphics card under £50 - surely someone's missing a trick?

[number34]

It runs fine on my desktop - Dual core E5200, 2 gb ram & ATI 5400. Also fine on laptop - Toshiba Satellite Pro i3-2310M & 4 gb ram so perhaps you have a problem unrelated to the machine?

(It is awful on my netbook!)

[Rawns]

Smooth as a nut on my machine.

 

Windows XP 32-Bit

Pentium Duel Core E5200 @ 2.50GHz

3.00GB of DDR2 RAM

ATI Radion HD 3400 running duel monitors.

 

Even if its stretched across both my screens to fill both, it's still runs nicely.

 

We installed it onto a couple of VM's for testing as well. It's sluggish at best but I would say it's still usable.

Edited June 23, 2011 by Rawns

[synaesthesia]

Out of interst can I enquire as to what OS you're running?

I know full well XP is going to be holding an i3 back considerably so wonder if newer OS's will make all the difference. For a start, the onboard graphics capability of an i3 is beyond that of an ati 5400 or dual core pentiums. Trying to find out if it's worth buying a discrete graphics cards for those that need to use Discover - so far it would seem a better idea to go win7 if that's the problem, rather than spending money on something that won't actually help.

The machines they have will run it, just rather slowly, and very importantly we could do without the whining "It's too slow!"

[number34]

Running Windows 7 on all of them.

[Rawns]

Out of interst can I enquire as to what OS you're running?

I know full well XP is going to be holding an i3 back considerably so wonder if newer OS's will make all the difference. For a start, the onboard graphics capability of an i3 is beyond that of an ati 5400 or dual core pentiums. Trying to find out if it's worth buying a discrete graphics cards for those that need to use Discover - so far it would seem a better idea to go win7 if that's the problem, rather than spending money on something that won't actually help.

The machines they have will run it, just rather slowly, and very importantly we could do without the whining "It's too slow!"

 

XP on all of our machines. We tested it on a (new) Win 7 laptop too and the performance was also good.

 

Win 7 Pro 64-Bit

Intel i5 Quad Core

4GB Memory

Intel DH Graphics

 

I would think that a dedicated GPU will be a better idea then an OS change as it would take less stress off the CPU where I would assume a newer OS would add more. Maybe invest in a single GPU and stick it in your PC to see how discover runs before and after? You could pick up a decent one for 30 quid or so.

Edited June 23, 2011 by Rawns

[Sivadam]

So out of interest, does anyone have a PC capable of running Discover so it doesn't run like a sack of manure?

 

Yep!. Quite a lot.

It has been speeded up quite a lot since the first release of the Field Trial version - just as was promised!

Now you know why I would not offer a required spec, when pestered here to do so in the earlier days - it was just not that relevant!

[synaesthesia]

We never ran any trial versions

Really trying to avoid buying anything for obvious reasons, hence trying to narrow things down first. As said, an i3 is beyond the capability of any (new) card under 30 quid hence why I do wonder if perhaps the Core I series specificaly needs a more modern OS to get the most out of the onboard GPU rather than XP machines which would probably work better with discrete.

Perhaps our expectations are too high!

[Rawns]

We never ran any trial versions

Really trying to avoid buying anything for obvious reasons, hence trying to narrow things down first. As said, an i3 is beyond the capability of any (new) card under 30 quid hence why I do wonder if perhaps the Core I series specificaly needs a more modern OS to get the most out of the onboard GPU rather than XP machines which would probably work better with discrete.

Perhaps our expectations are too high!

 

I can understand not wanting to splash cash, but still fail to see how upgrading to a more power (and visual) hungry O/S will help your Discover performance. It will just put more strain on the on board graphics chip (which is most likely struggling already as you memory and CPU specs seem up to scratch) and require more CPU power to process causing slow down. The i3 and a GPU are two separate things entirely. A powerful PC is not designed to "out-do" a lesser PC with a dedicated graphics card and make it unnecessary. My PC is under-speced compared to yours but the dedicated graphics card makes all the difference. By installing an affordable GPU (This would be more then suitable for the purposes of discover and under £30: Gigabyte G210 512MB GDDR2 DVI VGA HDMI Out PCI-E.. | Ebuyer.com) the graphics load would be compleatly removed from the CPU giving increased system performance as well as a smoother discover experience. My GPU is an ATI Raidon HD 3400 and runs Discover extreamly smoothly. A quick browse on eBay shows that you can get these for £19.99. After all, it's to improve the performance of Discover, not to play Crysis 2 or COD on.

 

Aslo, in Capita's Minimum System Requirements document, for Discover it states: "Recommended: Dedicated graphics cardwith the latest drivers installed and not an integrated chipset."

Edited June 23, 2011 by Rawns

[synaesthesia]

Those requirements were not including any Core i related chipsets.

 

Anyway the comments regarding the OS are clear - if you run anything quicker than a Pentium D on modern chipset motherboards on 7, it *IS* quicker than XP by quite a long way. Regardless of what drivers you wish to source and install, you will never get the benefits of modern hardware. XP cannot correctly handle Core2 chipsets let alone Core i3/5/7 and certainly isn't able to efficiently manage the on die memory controllers or GPU capababilities. The i3 I have in front of me, the new wave "celeron" if you like, has a gaming graphics capability in windows 7 of "5.4". Yet in XP it won't even run half the benchmarks because it doesn't recognise it as anything more than an Intel HD/GMA graphics card.

You seem to forget that the i3 *IS* a GPU - how is it not linked? As above, XP can't handle that properly. 7 can.

[superfletch]

AMD Fusion APU Codenamed

 

AMD Llano for laptops review: first look | PC Pro blog

 

The new range of AMD CPUS (Llano) that are aimed primarily at laptops, but also available for desktop motherboards are going to come in Dual and Quad core models and will incorporate a much more robust built in Graphics chipset. Speculation is that they might be available from next month.

 

If the PC Pro blog is correct it seems the raw performance isn't as good as intels i range but for graphics (even without a discrete card) it is significantly better.

 

Ideal for this maybe?

 

You seem to forget that the i3 *IS* a GPU - how is it not linked?

 

True, for comparison the i range only use a tiny part of the CPU for graphics where as about half the entire body of the Llano CPU is dedicated just to that.

 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

EDIT - Also for reference - a desktop PC running Discover under XP which is not a sack of bovine excrement:

 

HP Compaq dc7800

 

CPU is Dual Core 2.83 Ghz

2 GB RAM (2 x 1 GB)

ATI FireGL Graphics Card (512 Mb)

Edited June 23, 2011 by superfletch
multiple edits

[ajp233]

Not overly impressed with Discover so far to be honest. I thought the graphs were going to be much more flexible than they are. Anyone else feel the same?

[Sivadam]

Not overly impressed with Discover so far to be honest. I thought the graphs were going to be much more flexible than they are. Anyone else feel the same?

Nope!

The Assessment Graphs will be as good as your Assement data setup in AM7!

[number34]

It looks very impressive when first used but it needs a few SIMS polishes, eg show % and remove options not applicable to the school. I gave a demonstration to our pastoral leaders earlier this week and they liked what they saw. Have not managed to sort out the AM7 setups yet and will get back to you when I have.

[pcstru]

So all this, the power to render life like roads and landscapes rushing past my car at 130mph even as 120 times every second each aspect of the cars dynamics are calculated and updated in response to my inputs in Dirt 3 perhaps, or the vista of hundreds of square miles of landscape lit by a sunset rushing past my plane in X-Plane while the computer performs blade element analysis of laminar airflows over wing surfaces to give me a plane that behaves reasonably accurately, or a maybe level 10 detailed view of the planet Mars requiring 500MB of texture space and then put onto the screen in Orbiter even as it calculates the real time movements of thousands of bodies in the solar system; .. all this power is being used to display ... a ... a ... a ... pie chart. How fantastic is that!

[superfletch]

.. all this power is being used to display ... a ... a ... a ... pie chart. How fantastic is that!

 

I liked this post, hence the thanks but to be fair it isn't being used just to display the pie chart, it's being used to calculate it and then display it.

[LosOjos]

I liked this post, hence the thanks but to be fair it isn't being used just to display the pie chart, it's being used to calculate it and then display it.

 

Excel runs on my 300mhz pentium 2 laptop and can do that... the power required to run Discover is absolutely ridiculous, but then it should be no shock as SIMS is a memory hungry SOB too...

 

Aside from that, I do think Discover has lots of potential, but right now it feels like a beta product, I'm frankly amazed some of the flaws made it through to a public release, most notably for me the fact that all filters are added with the "and" operator, with no option to change to "or"; want to show male and female breakdown on a graph? No chance unless they are male AND female students...

 

EDIT: and just to pre-empt the "well it is free" comment I'm expecting, I appreciate the fact that Capita have provided us with a new free tool for SIMS, but most end users will just see a poorly functioning bit of software and add it to the "SIMS sucks" list of excuses not to use it

[pcstru]

I liked this post, hence the thanks but to be fair it isn't being used just to display the pie chart, it's being used to calculate it and then display it.

 

Very true!

 

Quite, nay ... totally unfair!!

 

I imagine actually calculating the data for the pie chart really eats into a modest modern processors performance of around 10,000,000,000 instructions per second. All those ... err ... um ... well probably attendance records or something. They could soon build up into tens, or even hundreds of thousands or records. Being able to process a few hundred thousand numbers is going to tie that processor up for ... ooooh (fx attempts to calculate 10^5/10^10) ... ages. And after that, actually displaying it ... well, phew. I think I need a little lie down!

[localzuk]

Note a key thing here - SIMS.Net is written using the .NET framework, and I'm assuming Discover is too. Your games were written using native languages such as c++. The prior takes a massive amount less effort to develop tools like this, the latter would require a much larger development team to develop the same thing - increasing costs, and therefore, I assume, increasing the price for schools.

 

.NET is very memory intensive, regardless of the software you use. A small application I have here opens a web page on launch, and runs a report in a reportviewer control, and displays a few other buttons/dropdowns etc... And it uses 33Mb of RAM. The same thing, if I wrote it in c++ could come in at 1Mb at most. I chose the .NET route because I can adjust my software so easily and quickly, and leverage advanced controls and features in minutes rather than days.

 

Its always a trade-off between requirements and development time.

[LosOjos]

Note a key thing here - SIMS.Net is written using the .NET framework, and I'm assuming Discover is too. Your games were written using native languages such as c++. The prior takes a massive amount less effort to develop tools like this, the latter would require a much larger development team to develop the same thing - increasing costs, and therefore, I assume, increasing the price for schools.

 

.NET is very memory intensive, regardless of the software you use. A small application I have here opens a web page on launch, and runs a report in a reportviewer control, and displays a few other buttons/dropdowns etc... And it uses 33Mb of RAM. The same thing, if I wrote it in c++ could come in at 1Mb at most. I chose the .NET route because I can adjust my software so easily and quickly, and leverage advanced controls and features in minutes rather than days.

 

Its always a trade-off between requirements and development time.

 

Very good point and one that lots would fail to appreciate, however I don't think it's unfair to expect a company the size of Capita with contracts from various ventures bringing in billions every year to develop their own system and indeed to have the man-power to do so...

 

Of course I'm only speculating as it's not going to change any time soon!

 

EDIT: by own system what I really meant was not to rely on the bloated framework that is .NET - I personally don't think any professional and critical piece of software should be based on .NET though, not when it eats up as much memory as it does, not too mention how easy .NET is to de-compile...

Edited June 23, 2011 by LosOjos

[superfletch]

@pcstru & @LosOjos

 

Both fair comments, I didn't mean to say what it was doing calculating the Pie charts was a massively intensive task, I simply meant to say that it wasn't just displaying the things.

 

@localzuk - Kudos for top knowledge, I went to add rep but it wouldn't allow it, must have repped you at some point recently for something else

[localzuk]

Very good point and one that lots would fail to appreciate, however I don't think it's unfair to expect a company the size of Capita with contracts from various ventures bringing in billions every year to develop their own system and indeed to have the man-power to do so...

 

Of course I'm only speculating as it's not going to change any time soon!

 

The thing is, if I were running the Capita ES division, I'd be making the same decisions about using .NET. Not using .NET would be a really bad business decision now, as the resulting code and programs are easier to maintain, and easier to port to new (microsoft) technologies in the future - such as making web based applications, or Win Mobile 7 applications etc...

 

Not developing business systems in managed code now would be silly.

[LosOjos]

The thing is, if I were running the Capita ES division, I'd be making the same decisions about using .NET. Not using .NET would be a really bad business decision now, as the resulting code and programs are easier to maintain, and easier to port to new (microsoft) technologies in the future - such as making web based applications, or Win Mobile 7 applications etc...

 

Not developing business systems in managed code now would be silly.

 

I can see the logic from that point of view, and as I said this is all speculation as it's not going to change now, but if I were to be tasked with making an MIS, it wouldn't be on a platform specific framework like .NET, I'd be looking at either having it entirely server based with a web client or built on Java for the sake of portability.

 

The problem with using .NET is that it is very memory hungry, it is very inefficient (from a code POV, not a time POV) and it is dependent on a Windows environment... OK they aren't major problems right now, but the path for a competitor to take the market is being left wide open... but maybe that's a topic for the blue skies forum...

[pcstru]

@localzuk, while there is a performance difference between .NET and C++, we are talking about environments where data from a typical schools database could fit into the memory of an average PC several times over (assuming a modicum of storage efficiency) and where modest processors can perform 10,000,000,000 instructions every second (a core i7 extreme can do nearly 160 billion IPS). The difference between .net and c++ can't really account for the poor performance. And yes, I too would probably choose to code SIMS in .NET not C++, for exactly the reasons you state. But if a developer told me that I then needed a Core i3 with a multicore GPU to draw a pie chart and that was down to coding in .NET, well ... I'd ask them to go away and have a wee think about that.

 

My bet would be that the performance is constrained by the database, probably a result of poorly designed schema but probably mostly poorly optimised SQL and poorly thought out transactions between the client and the database. Requiring a multi GPU graphics card that is capable, like the main processor of dealing with billions of (geometric) operations per second, to draw .... a pie chart (!) is nonsense. It is a strategy of throwing hardware at a problem when you are unable (for whatever reason) to address the actual, underlying problem.

[PhilNeal]

I suppose being on EduGeek you're interested in the technology. I'm interested in what something can do and I've seen enough revelations in schools to know that this is a very powerful tool.

 

The development team's brief was not to make it run on a hairdryer; it was to produce a very powerful tool that was really easy to use. You do need to understand assessment result sets to get valuable information out however or you will be reduced to finding out how many Italians eat sandwiches!

 

As it happens in will run on fairly ordinary kit but integrated graphics are of variable quality.