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.
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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.