AMD Frame Pacing Explored: Catalyst 13.8 Brings Consistency to Crossfire
by Ryan Smith on August 1, 2013 2:00 PM ESTBattlefield 3
Our multiplayer action game of our benchmark suite is Battlefield 3, DICE’s 2011 multiplayer military shooter. Its ability to pose a significant challenge to GPUs has been dulled some by time and drivers, but it’s still a challenge if you want to hit the highest settings at the highest resolutions at the highest anti-aliasing levels. Furthermore while we can crack 60fps in single player mode, our rule of thumb here is that multiplayer framerates will dip to half our single player framerates, so hitting high framerates here may not be high enough.
BF3 typically favors NVIDIA cards, so it comes as no great shock that performance has once again flipped in advantage of the GTX 690.
Looking at our delta percentages this is another game where AMD has made massive gains; previously they’d be so unbalanced that every other frame for a long stretch of the benchmark would be a runt frame. 12.6% is the single best showing for the 7990 and much closer to where we would like AMD to be. They still have more than twice the variability of the GTX 690, but if every game were like this AMD would in a better position than where they’re going to be with this first phase of frame pacing.
The graphical representation of our FCAT data neatly matches our numeric analysis, once again showcasing AMD’s improved frame pacing, while showing how much farther they have to go to catch NVIDIA.
Finally this is another case where improving on the frame pacing situation by so much has greatly improved on 95th percentile times. Though 7990 still trails GTX 690, as you’d expect given the latter’s general performance lead.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
102 Comments
View All Comments
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."