AMD Frame Pacing Explored: Catalyst 13.8 Brings Consistency to Crossfire
by Ryan Smith on August 1, 2013 2:00 PM ESTTotal War: Shogun 2
Our first detailed benchmark is Shogun 2, which is a continuing favorite to our benchmark suite. Total War: Shogun 2 is the latest installment of the long-running Total War series of turn based strategy games, and alongside Civilization V is notable for just how many units it can put on a screen at once. Even 2 years after its release it’s still a very punishing game at its highest settings due to the amount of shading and memory those units require.
For the sake of completeness we’re posting our frame rate charts for each of our individual games, but in general there’s nothing here we haven’t seen before in the 7990 review, in other reviews, or in Bench. The 7990 and GTX 690 still swap places fairly regularly.
Looking at our expanded delta percentages for Shogun, we can see how the 7990 and other Crossfire solutions stack up to the GTX 690 and other SLI solutions. For all AFR configurations the results match what we saw in our summary, with NVIDIA’s solutions offering lower deltas than AMD’s even with the new drivers.
This is actually AMD’s weakest game, with both the 7970GECF and 7990 exceeding 20% variability on this game. However it’s also the only non-action game in this collection, so it’s the game least affected by higher levels of variation and consequently the game AMD can afford to do the worst at. Nevertheless the improvement over Catalyst 13.6 without frame pacing is nothing short of amazing.
Meanwhile we’ll hit upon this a few times, but as a reminder AMD’s frame pacing improvements apply to older cards too, so the 6990 has its frame pacing problems resolved like the rest of AMD’s multi-GPU cards. It actually does better than the rest, we believe due to the fact that the lower framerate and higher frame times give AMD’s drivers more time to analyze and schedule frames.
Looking at the FCAT graphs, we can see that the higher variability of the 7990’s frame times is represented well. Though NVIDIA’s frame time spikes are more extreme than AMD’s.
Finally we have our 95th percentile frame times. Despite the fact that AMD’s framerates are down slightly versus Catalyst 13.6, their 95% percentile times are way up. Simply by instituting frame pacing they’ve dropped from 36.2ms to 21.5ms per frame.
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Feellia - Friday, August 2, 2013 - link
Not aimed at anyone, but flat out in any competitive game play the kind that has tourneys and pays out cash, Mostly fps such as quake..etc everyone has vsync off it flat out adds input lag...all the pros turn it off no matter what monitor is used, but no one is running a SLI/CrossfFire set up during these events.The pros typically lower settings quite damn low so they can push a steady 125fps and screen tearing is absolutely no concern. And if i have vsync on my aim % takes a nearly 25% dip
Anyway this is review is about duel+ cards, and kudos to AMD even though they still need a bit of work before going on a official non beta release = )
piwo - Friday, August 2, 2013 - link
can you check a10- 5750m with hd6670?dew111 - Friday, August 2, 2013 - link
I just got a second HD 7950, and this driver makes a HUGE difference! They should have done this earlier, but their timing was great for my first CrossFire setup :PJamesWoods - Sunday, August 4, 2013 - link
It's a crying shame they won't jump back to HD 4000 series or even HD 3000 series and fix these problems. I'm sure there is still quite a large loyal fanbase using these cards. I happen to own several systems with HD 4850's in them, and they can still set pace on a lot of modern games. Crossfire is another story. They never really felt optimized running in X fire.medi02 - Tuesday, August 6, 2013 - link
Is it me, or does nVidia have much lower min fps on a number of charts? =)transphasic - Tuesday, August 6, 2013 - link
Well done, AMD! You didn't bother to do anything about creating fixes for the single GPU setup, and basically ignored those w/o CF setups.You had 2 1/2 months without any new driver fixes, and THIS is the BEST you can do?
Major fail once again.
Thanks for nothing....
medi02 - Wednesday, August 7, 2013 - link
Exactly which single GPU setup is giving you micro stuttering problem?usrevenge - Wednesday, August 7, 2013 - link
Basically, AMD did a lot to fix the problems, but still leaves a lot of work to be done. I call these drivers a success.Nearox - Monday, August 26, 2013 - link
Does this technology also apply to the HD6000 series (and in particular the HD6950)? Could anyone say if this will also work for Skyrim? Thinking about getting a 2nd hand hd6950 to go xfire with this, seeing the good results from this AnandTech test.lopper - Wednesday, August 28, 2013 - link
A question: Does this driver fix stuttering on dual graphics configurations like A10 +6670?