AMD Frame Pacing Explored: Catalyst 13.8 Brings Consistency to Crossfire

Hitman: Absolution

The second game in our lineup is Hitman: Absolution. The latest game in Square Enix’s stealth-action series, Hitman: Absolution is a DirectX 11 based title that though a bit heavy on the CPU, can give most GPUs a run for their money. Furthermore it has a built-in benchmark, which gives it a level of standardization that fewer and fewer benchmarks possess.

Again there’s nothing really new here. In the previous game the GTX 690 led, while in Hitman the 7990 leads.

Moving on to our delta percentages, we again see the gains AMD has made with their frame pacing implementation, though Hitman was one of their better games in the first place. Consequently they’ve shaved off 11 percentage points, from 31 to 20, just enough to reach our 20% threshold but no more. This is still 13 percentage points worse than the GTX 690 however, so much like Shogun there’s still clear room for further improvement.

Meanwhile the FCAT graph data shows the same thing we saw with our numerical analysis, with the 7990 showing a much greater degree of variability. AMD’s frame pacing mechanism seems to be much less present here than in other games, with the adaptive window less noticeable here than elsewhere, perhaps due to the relatively high variability.

The smaller gains with regards to deltas are reflected in a much smaller improvement on 95^th percentile times. Though in this case at the 95^th percentile the 7990 is competitive with the GTX 690.