AMD Frame Pacing Explored: Catalyst 13.8 Brings Consistency to Crossfire

Crysis 3

Our final benchmark in our suite needs no introduction. With Crysis 3, Crytek has gone back to trying to kill computers, taking back the “most punishing game” title in our benchmark suite. Only in a handful of setups can we even run Crysis 3 at its highest (Very High) settings, and that’s still without AA. Crysis 1 was an excellent template for the kind of performance required to driver games for the next few years, and Crysis 3 looks to be much the same for 2013.

Our last game and our last flip. AMD and NVIDIA exchange places one final time, with the GTX 690 and 7990 swapping out so that the GTX 690 takes the lead.

Crysis 3 is another game where AMD’s initial position wasn’t quite as bad, and consequently the improvements aren’t as great. 19% gets them to the acceptable range on the 7990, while at the same time with only 4 percentage points separating the 7990 and GTX 690 means that this is the closest the two cards have ever come to matching each other in frame time consistency.

Graphically we can see that both AMD and NVIDIA still struggle with consistency to some extent. GTX 690 in particular has a short run of very high variability about 10 seconds in that AMD doesn’t experience, likely due to their hard cap on minimum frame times.

Finally on the matter of 95^th percentile times, our data here mirrors what we’ve seen earlier. AMD shows a smaller gain, with their final value of 20.7ms still leaving them a couple of milliseconds behind the faster GTX 690.