Fable Legends Early Preview: DirectX 12 Benchmark Analysis

Discussing Percentiles and Minimum Frame Rates

Continuing from the previous page, we performed a similar analysis on AMD's Fury X graphics card. Same rules apply - all three resolution/setting combinations using all three system configurations. Results are given as frame rate profiles showing percentiles as well as choosing the 90th, 95th and 99th percentile values to get an indication of minimum frame rates.

Moving on to the Fury X at 4K and we see all three processor lineups performing similarly, giving us an indication that we are more GPU limited here. There is a slight underline on the Core i7 though, giving slightly lower frame rates in easier scenes but a better frame rate when the going gets tough beyond the 95th percentile.

For 1080p, the results take a twist. It almost seems as if we have some form of reverse scaling, whereby more cores is doing more damage to the results. If we have a look at the breakdown provided by the in-game benchmark (given in milliseconds, so lower is better):

Three areas stand out as benefitting from fewer cores: Transparency and Effects, GBuffer Rendering and Dynamic Lighting. All three are related to illumination and how the illumination interacts with its surroundings. One reason springs to mind on this – with large core counts, too many threads are issuing work to the graphics card causing thread contention in the cache or giving the thread scheduler a hard time depending on what comes in as high priority.

Nevertheless, the situation changes when we move down again to 720p:

Here the Core i3 takes a nose dive as we become CPU limited to pushing out the frames.