AMD Frame Pacing Explored: Catalyst 13.8 Brings Consistency to Crossfire
by Ryan Smith on August 1, 2013 2:00 PM ESTHitman: 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 95th percentile times. Though in this case at the 95th percentile the 7990 is competitive with the GTX 690.
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boot318 - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
I've read a couple people got "black screened" when they did this update on one GPU. I'm not saying that will happen, but you better prepare for it if you do.Bob Todd - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
I may have missed this when I skimmed through the results, but have you heard anything about rough estimates from AMD about a frame pacing release supporting Eyefinity (e.g. Q4, H1 2014, etc.)? I know it's still a tiny percentage of users, but there are relatively cheap 1080p IPS panels now so building a nice looking 5760x1080 setup is pretty affordable these days. After playing games this way, it's something I wish I had done earlier, and I'm eager to see a frame pacing driver supporting this setup.Ryan Smith - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
Sorry, AMD didn't give us an ETA on that one. Let me see if I can still get one out of them.DanNeely - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
HardOCP says DX9 and Eyefinity support should be available in a driver update later this month.http://www.hardocp.com/article/2013/08/01/amd_cata...
DeviousOrange - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
I am hoping this will also improve Dual Graphics, will give it a test over the weekend.Homeles - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
Well I'll be damned. They did it. Not quite as good as Nvidia, but at this point, the difference isn't really one worth mentioning.xdrol - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
The link is bad for the driver, please remove "-auth" from the URL.chizow - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
Like watching a baby crawl. Good first step for AMD, but still a long way to go.AMD and their fans can thank the press (mainly TechReport and HardOCP, sorry Derek, you guys were way late to the party and still not fully onboard with FCAT measurements) and Nvidia fans for making such a big stink of this. Lord knows AMD and their fans were too busy looking the other way to address it, anyways.
Hopefully AMD and their fans take something away from this: if you want to improve your product, don't try to sweep it under the rug, address it, own it, and demand a fix for it.
chizow - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
Sorry my above post should reference the author Ryan, not Derek (was thinking of your predecessor), when referring to AT not being at the forefront of this runtframe/microstutter issue.Also, I feel the accolades given to TechReport, while not completely undeserving, should also be given to PCPer's Ryan Shrout and some of the German publications like PCGamesHardware. While TechReport did start the ball rolling with some new ways to measure frame latency/microstutter, Ryan Shrout really harped on the runtframe issue until Nvidia worked with him in unveiling FCAT. Also, the German sites have been hammering AMD for years about their much worst microstuttering in CF, largely ignored by the NA press/blogs. And finally Kyle at HardOCP has said for years SLI felt smoother than CF with some Pepsi challenge type user testing, but not so much hard evidence as presented here as well as other sites.
Finally Ryan, are these new metrics you've done an excellent job of formulating going to make it into future benchmarks? Or are you going to just assume the issue has been fixed going forward? I would love to take AMD's word on it but as we've seen from both vendors in the past, driver regression is commonplace unless constantly revisited by users, reviewers, and the vendors alike.
Ryan Smith - Friday, August 2, 2013 - link
"Finally Ryan, are these new metrics you've done an excellent job of formulating going to make it into future benchmarks?"They'll be in future articles in a limited form, similar to how we handled the GTX 780 launch. It takes a lot of additional work to put this data together, which isn't always time we have available. Especially if it becomes doing hours of extra work to collect data just to say "yep, still no stuttering."