AMD Frame Pacing Explored: Catalyst 13.8 Brings Consistency to Crossfire
by Ryan Smith on August 1, 2013 2:00 PM ESTSleeping Dogs
Another Square Enix game, Sleeping Dogs is one of the few open world games to be released with any kind of benchmark, giving us a unique opportunity to benchmark an open world game. Like most console ports, Sleeping Dogs’ base assets are not extremely demanding, but it makes up for it with its interesting anti-aliasing implementation, a mix of FXAA and SSAA that at its highest settings does an impeccable job of removing jaggies. However by effectively rendering the game world multiple times over, it can also require a very powerful video card to drive these high AA modes.
Once more the tables turn with frame rates, and we see the 7990 hold on to a very small lead over the GTX 690.
Sleeping Dogs is another title where AMD has greatly improved on their frame consistency. With Catalyst 13.6 the 7990 had deltas over 100% (the variability was larger than the average frame time) which has since been heavily reduced with frame pacing. The end result eliminated AMD’s runt frames in this benchmark, and pushing them down to the 20% range. Still, this pales in comparison to the GTX 690. Though we do see the 6990 doing rather well for itself due to its lower frame rate, even with this metric compensating for that factor. It’s clearly a lot easier to schedule frames when you have more time to do it.
This is another case of where AMD’s massive improvements on frame pacing have led to an improvement in frame times at the 95th percentile. Here they shave off 7ms, and not unlike their frame rate are slightly ahead of the GTX 690.
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chizow - Friday, August 2, 2013 - link
Agree for the most part, but I wouldn't go as far to say boycott AMD, I'd say it's a good learning experience for AMD fans. In order to better their own products, they need to be forthcoming and honest about their experiences. If something's broken, demand a fix, don't sit there and dismiss or minimize the problem, or worst, deflect the issue toward the competition in denial. In the end, they just end up hurting themselves by gimping the products they enjoy.Will Robinson - Tuesday, August 13, 2013 - link
Please go back to spamming the comments section at Tech Report with your NVDA shill buddy Wreckage.Its beyond boring having to read it here too.
chizow - Friday, August 2, 2013 - link
Tom Petersen, Technical Marketing Director for Nvidia, has stated Nvidia has had built-in frame metering provisions since at least G80. Nvidia invented modern day AFR and they have clearly put a lot of thought behind it with the science to back it up. Every time you see them talk about AFR/microstutter/runtframes you see a lot of detailed technical slides and backup. Not so much from AMD. It should be obvious why Nvidia has had less of an issue with microstutter, they actually knew what they were looking to fix.http://techreport.com/review/22890/nvidia-geforce-...
"Nvidia's Tom Petersen threw us for a loop by asserting that Nvidia's GPUs have had, since "at least" the G80, a built-in provision called frame metering that attempts to counteract the problem."
Sabresiberian - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
Tech Reports is a competing company to AMD?While it is very good to see AMD making progress here, it is far from over for both AMD and Nvidia. Both companies have work to do to get frame rates to be consistent and high.
BryanDobbins - Saturday, August 17, 2013 - link
my neighbor's mom makes $72/hour on the internet. She has been unemployed for 7 months but last month her pay check was $19114 just working on the internet for a few hours. Read more on this web site... http://goo.gl/qHdAQ4Mondozai - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
Always liked Ryan's articles but I hope he gets to write more for this site in the future. For example, he should write more about mobile GPU's now that that area is gaining importance(this year we get to see PowerVR's newest generation, Rogue and next year we get to see Kepler in Tegra 5). Yet he didn't write anything on Tegra 5's Kepler story on this site even if he is the expert on GPU's.Doing a story on AMD drivers is all well and good but honestly, would like to see moar.
Ryan Smith - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
We have some in-depth mobile coverage scheduled for later this year, though I can't go into any more detail on it at this moment.mwildtech - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
Great write up! Thanks Ryan!SeeManRun - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
It wasn't totally clear from reading, but is there any point in upgrading to this driver if you have a single graphics card? It doesn't appear so.DanNeely - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
Release notes aren't out yet; but the 3rd page mentions that it adds full OpenGL ES 3.0 support as well as other not yes specified improvements. Most likely they include the obligatory few games to get a performance boost; but it's not purely a crossfire update.