Should reviews that don't use FCAT be ignored?

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Siberian

Senior member
Jul 10, 2012
258
0
0
Pure fps numbers are a terrible measure of game play. Now that FCAT exists and can show how smooth a card is actually playing each game it should be the primary benchmarking tool. Saying card x gets 50 fps so it is better than card y that gets 45 fps can be very misleading.
 

gorobei

Diamond Member
Jan 7, 2007
3,957
1,443
136
Pure fps numbers are a terrible measure of game play. Now that FCAT exists and can show how smooth a card is actually playing each game it should be the primary benchmarking tool. Saying card x gets 50 fps so it is better than card y that gets 45 fps can be very misleading.

if you read any of the other posts or listened to the techreport podcasts, you would know that it only measures frame delivery. perceived smoothness is a separate matter. a card may deliver frames on a regular sub 15ms interval, but if some of the frames are duplicates/glitch/or runt frames it can still be perceived as a video lag or hitch. unless everyone is outputting/capturing the raw capture frames and running the analysis tools to sort through the actual frames the FCAT numbers are at worse meaningless or at best suspect.