Hello again. Apologies for the slow updates here. There's a reason for it, and it's because I commute for work pretty far. I'm not happy about it, but it is what it is. Besides that, I figured I would write about my most recent computer adventure in a bit.

Deadlock

A few weeks ago, I stumbled across an invitation on Steam for a game I completely forgot about after hearing about it initially: Deadlock. Deadlock is a new and in-development game created by Valve, and the initial reactions to the game are pretty mixed, I would have to say.

Deadlock (now that it has a Steam page) is an iteration upon their tried-and-true Dota 2 formula. Dota is a game that I played for many years until I took myself off that addiction. Dota spans many characters, each with interesting abilities and fascinating gameplay that players subject themselves to learning to get better at the game. Dota has (if I was being completely honest) lost a lot of popularity, and the e-sports scene as such taken more interest in games like Counter-Strike 2, another game by Valve. Don't get me wrong, I love both games equally.

Valve was lacking for a number of years in the fun and casual multiplayer game space for a pretty long time. Ever since the likes of Overwatch was released back in 2016, Valve didn't really have a foot in the quick-and-casual game for people on consoles. Their closest was Team Fortress 2, which was an original title on the Orange Box collection years ago, but never made it's way over onto the 8th and 9th generation consoles. It's hard to say if a 17-year old game can stand the test of time, and TF2 itself has been subject to scrutiny from players due to a lack of updates from Valve. Many players feel it is unfair the treatment TF2 gets, and TF2 even has a bot problem that is out of control.

Fast-forward to 2024, beyond TF2 or Dota or CS, we've reached Deadlock. What the heck is Deadlock? If I had to describe it, it's a MOBA like Dota, but in third-person perspective, a multiplayer game that Valve has never done, and has players wondering if it's too many years too late. Smite was already sort of doing what Deadlock is doing now, except now it's under Valve's umbrella, and thousands of players are now playing Deadlock every day.

Deadlock is a third-person "hero shooter" where you (similar to Dota) farm creeps in auto-spawning creep lanes on a very large city map. Together with five other players, you fight against a team of six opposing heroes in a goal to take down the opponents' base before they take down yours. Simple format, very similar to Dota, but is it actually good?

For a shooter, I think it's pretty okay. It's also free! And really rings home a sense of junky shooters where you don't have to be perfect to do well. I think the laning stage where you farm is exciting, and I think the mobilizing your party or friends to do large-scale battles is also pretty fun. The emotional rollercoaster is pretty wild, and there's ups and downs with each game. There's also a lot of imbalance currently amongst the hero roster (thanks Seven).

PC Woes

Playing a new Valve game is not without it's own problems. My hardware is showing it's age.

The first instance of problems showed up in Deadlock when approaching big, large-scale battles with lots of things going on. My frames per second (FPS) would start capping out and hitting the low 20s when these battles were going on. Sometimes even when I get taken out of a fight and forced to respawn, the FPS would still be struggling.

The reason being? My VRAM count sucks on my really old graphics card.

My graphics card is not fancy; it's an RX 480 with 4GB of VRAM. It's cheap and it worked for years, and I never gave thought to upgrading it due to GPU wars during the pandemic. I basically put off for as long as humanly possible because... Well, I didn't really feel compelled to pay more for something I wasn't in total need of.

The crappy old GPU eventually lead to another circumstance of me playing Deadlock and weird things happening. During a real player match, I was forcibly booted from the game because my GPU blacked out and restarted my desktop environment. It wasn't a hard crash since I didn't have to press a power button; the GPU must've crashed from overwork and my computer saw it and likely just crashed the desktop as a safe measure. I was ejected from my voice call and my friends didn't hear from me until I booted back into the game and saw me moving around again.

The other issue is, my RAM seems to also be capping out at times. I have 2x8GB RAM sticks, which only seems to come out to 14.5GB due to what I'll call "RAM Math", and when playing the game, I tend to hit that capacity more often than not, and I leak over into swap memory pretty frequently. This was an issue even before Deadlock, as I can sometimes leak over 1GB of memory into swap when doing random things during the day.

So, both my GPU VRAM and my RAM are issues. I guess it's time to upgrade...

Part Picking

As someone who pays for electricity now as a full-functioning adult, I don't really want to pay more electricity than I have to. I would rather opt and keep my PSU which is a gold-rated 650W power supply. Picking a higher-rated TDP graphics card would most likely mean I need to up my power intake, and I don't really feel like upgrading to something like 750W if I don't have to. I'm pretty minimalist like that, I suppose.

Now, as far as graphics cards go, I would never pick an Nvidia card, so that rules out at least a good chunk of cards on the market.

Doing an initial dive into AMD Radeon cards, the last generation available is the 7000 RX series of cards, so I start my search there. Almost instantly, I'm laser focused on the AMD RX 7600 XT model card which looks to be almost exactly what I would want or need. Decentish performance, lots of memory available, generally an up-to-date lower end spec card which matches my power budget. I think the price is a little higher than it should be, but I think having more VRAM this time around would mean the card should easily last another five years before needing another replacement. Hell, I'd be surprised if I could even find a game that would push that limit.

The RAM, I was able to find two sticks 32GB each to bring my total RAM up to a whopping 64GB of RAM. Reason being is I was jealous of a laptop of mine having 64GB RAM, while my computer had only a quarter of that and I spend far more time on my desktop. It was time to grow up and spend the money.

While I was also at Microcenter, I picked up a new 140mm chassis fan for my top fan to replace. The old fan is starting to go, so I picked up it's replacement that should be much quieter.

(Aside: a Microcenter employee was teaching a young teen how to use PCPartPicker to help him decide his first rig, and I felt it was such a precious moment.)

Installation

The last time I was neck deep in my case was last year when I ripped out my motherboard to swap it for the AM5 compatible board for my Ryzen 5 7600X CPU. It might not be the most popular CPU, but I love it for the value I've gotten out of it. The motherboard replacement was honestly tiring, and I was excited to do an upgrade that wouldn't involve that.

First up, unplugging the graphics card, RAM and chassis fan. All simple tasks. I removed IO shielding locking the card in place, took out the RAM, and unscrewed the fan from the top of the case. Overall, not difficult stuff. Worst bit was finding what the hell I plugged my case fan into, and it was seriously plugged in the wrong place. Oops. Never noticed.

After the fan mistake was corrected, the fan went in with an easy four screws. For comparison, here's a clean fan versus the old one. Oof.

The GPU and RAM are also trivial installs, and I wish I could make it more interesting than simply "I drag and dropped the parts into the PC." I didn't even think to check if I had the correct pins from the PSU, but thankfully there was no change and the cards were equal in input pins.

RAM was easily swapped, nothing much else to do, other than clean up a whole lot of dust that I've ignored.

Post Install

The only thing left to do now is to turn on the damn thing. After changing the video card out, all my video inputs are different. I have one less HDMI port and one more DisplayPort, so one of my three monitors had to get cable swapped. That unfortunately means I have to redo my Sway monitor configuration to correct the output names and get that in order again. I also edit it in Gnome Desktop just to get GDM to play ball.

htop reports a correct amount of memory, my fan is spinning, and the video card appears to be video'ing correctly. Nothing much to report here.

Now let's take it into a bot match on Deadlock. Reason being is that Deadlock multiplayer servers aren't online during the day, typically only during the evening so they can gather data and make corrections the next day. Now, I play on pretty medium tier settings. I don't really enjoy antialiasing as it's usually a performance hog, and I like my textures pretty simple and don't do extraneous effects or screen space ambient occlusion, at least not without some extra testing.

Parts of the game are laggy, like initial loads of objects and textures into memory, but I think it holds up pretty well all things considered it's a game largely in beta. You can see that it's built off some Dota 2 parts, with the interface for settings being nearly identical (and some broken tooltip strings may actually refer to Dota).

Besides funny things like that, the stats in my new build look something like this while running Deadlock in a bot match.

Inspecting Mission Center now, the difference is pretty clear. While I might not totally cleared the CPU usage, I was able to at least give the game some headroom in that regard. The VRAM issue is totally gone, as the game tends to make my system hover around 5GB VRAM usage. So long as I'm not playing more than two instances of Deadlock, I should be fine. Here's my system specs after the upgrades.

Conclusion

Overall, I think I spent close to $600 in parts, and maybe I could have gotten better deals for better price points, but I can't really complain. I didn't have to upgrade the PSU, and I got enough RAM to last me a very long time, at least until AM5 is a thing of the past. Didn't have to get a whole new chassis, and it took me less than an hour to do all the replacement. I kinda like how simple my case is, but I wish my glass panel was less boring and a little quicker to get to the internals. I can dream about another case one day.

I apologize for the short post, but I wrote this almost entirely on a train as my commutes are long and annoying. I am going to try my best and catch up writing using this new phone process of mine, so I hope I start writing more soon enough.

If you like this post, please let me know and I'll try my best to improve. This one has more pictures than I typically do, and I'm trying to get into a better editing groove. One real pain point is GIMP is absolutely terrible on Sway WM, and I imagine it's a wlroots problem and GIMP trying to use Xwayland for everything. But besides that, I'll try my best to keep these posts slightly more entertaining.

Until the next post written on a train!