Techreport - A new look at game benchmarking

[Dribble]

This is a very interesting article about better ways of benching rendering speed in games:
http://techreport.com/articles.x/21516/1

Instead of measuring fps which by giving an average for a whole second hides some rendering problems, they measure the time of individual frames which allows them to see problems with graphics cards that while maintaining a good fps have some frames rendered very slowly which the human eye picks up on. Certainly highlights problems with Sli/Xfire and microstuttering.

 

[BrentJ]

We figured out quite a long time ago that FPS numbers lie, in regards to a game's true gameplay performance. This is why we switched to relating the highest playable gameplay performance a video card is capable of in games, and comparing that way. By actually playing the game, and not running benchmarks and timedemos, we are able to detect these hitches in framerate, and report that to you, as well as find out what settings alleviate those hitches or lag in framerate, and by that measure, we see what the best card is and what kind of experience the cards deliver. Frames Per Second is certainly not the best way to compare video cards, the numbers do not tell the whole truth. It is part of the equation, but not the entire equation.

 

[biostud]

Presumably, a jitter pattern alternating between five- and 15-millisecond frame times would be less of an annoyance than a 15- and 45-millisecond pattern. The worst example we saw in our testing alternated between roughly six and twenty milliseconds, but it didn't jump out at me as a problem during our original testing. Just now, I fired up Bad Company 2 on a pair of Radeon HD 6870s with the latest Catalyst 11.8 drivers. Fraps measures the same degree of jitter we saw initially, but try as I might, I can't see the problem.We may need to spend more time with (ugh) faster TN panels, rather than our prettier and slower IPS displays, in order to get a better feel for the stuttering issue.

So basically they can measure the problem but, it doesn't affect game play.

 

[BFG10K]

Repost.

Super Moderator BFG10K.