Testing Methodology
Reporting average fps (frames per second) using Fraps is how things have been done for... well, forever. It's a fantastic metric in the sense that it's easy to record and easy to understand. But it doesn't tell the whole story, as The Tech Report and others have shown.
To get a fuller picture, it's increasingly apparent that you need to factor in a card's frame latency, which looks at how quickly each frame is delivered. Regardless of how many frames a graphics card produces on average in 60 seconds, if it can't deliver them all at roughly the same speed, you might see more brief jittery points with one GPU over another – something we've witnessed but didn't fully understand.
Assuming two cards deliver equal average frame rates, the one with lowest stable frame latency is going to offer the smoothest picture, and that's a pretty important detail to consider if you're about to drop a wad of cash. As such, we'll be including this information from now on by measuring how long in milliseconds it takes cards to render each frame individually and then graphing that in a digestible way.
We'll be using the latency-focused 99th percentile metric, which looks at 99% of results recorded within X milliseconds, and the lower that number is, the faster and smoother the performance is overall. By removing 1% of the most extreme results, it's possible to filter anomalies that might have been caused by other components. Again, kudos to The Tech Report and other sites like PCPer for shining a light on this issue.
Test System Specs
- Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition (3.30GHz)
- x4 2GB G.Skill DDR3-1600(CAS 8-8-8-20)
- Asrock X79 Extreme11 (Intel X79)
- OCZ ZX Series (1250W)
- Crucial m4 512GB (SATA 6Gb/s)
- Radeon HD 7990 (6144MB)
- Radeon HD 7970 GHz (3072MB) Crossfire
- Radeon HD 7970 GHz (3072MB)
- Radeon HD 7970 (3072MB)
- Radeon HD 7950 Boost (3072MB) Crossfire
- Radeon HD 7950 Boost (3072MB)
- Radeon HD 7950 (3072MB)
- Radeon HD 7870 (2048MB) Crossfire
- Radeon HD 7870 (2048MB)
- GeForce GTX Titan (6144MB)
- GeForce GTX 780 (3072MB)
- GeForce GTX 690 (4096MB)
- GeForce GTX 680 (2048MB)
- GeForce GTX 670 (2048MB)
- GeForce GTX 660 Ti (2048MB) SLI
- GeForce GTX 660 Ti (2048MB)
- Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 64-bit
- Nvidia Forceware 320.14
- AMD Catalyst 13.5 (Beta 2)