Resident Evil 6 Benchmark – Frame Time measurement – GTX 680 vs. Titan vs. HD 7970 GHz ed.

Capcom has just released a new Resident Evil 6 benchmark in advance of the PC release on March 26th.  Although it is DX9c, it is quite demanding at higher resolutions and we are going to evaluate it at 1920×1080, 2560×1600 and at 5760×1080 with our GTX 680, Geforce Titan, and HD 7970 with an eye to “smoothness” of frame delivery.  We are also going to compare frame latency charts at 1920×1080 at both 60Hz and 120Hz. 

In our last three evaluations, we established that Fraps is a very good measure of frame rates (fps) as well as its ability to measure frame times for single-GPU video cards. Fraps outputs results that can be charted in Excel or a similar spreadsheet program if “frametimes” is checked (along with “FPS” and “MinMaxAvg” which are usually measured, under the “FPS” tab). And we also established that using a SSD versus a HDD for benching does not generally impact frame time smoothness although we will take care to use identical drives when benchmarking.

We looked at eleven in-game benchmarks – especially the STALKER, Call of Pripyat stand-alone benchmark and Metro 2033’s official benchmark, as well as Far Cry 2, because their game engines also measures frame times. By comparing the game engines reported timing with Fraps frame time measurements, we found that the charts – although not identical – were so close as to nearly mirror each others results.

We feel reasonably confident as we proceed that Fraps is as useful a tool in reporting frame times as it is for frame rates. We also found that using a hard disk drive (HDD) versus a solid state drive (SSD) has little impact using Fraps to measure the smoothness of a gaming experience although we shall always bench from identical drives.We are still using the stock-clocked GTX 680 in in this evaluation and we shall pit its frame time smoothness of delivery versus the HD 7970 at GHz edition clocks in this demo benchmark.  Nvidia released GeForce GTX Titan last week and ABT was able to evaluate it using 36 benchmarks with the traditional average frame rate (fps) comparison.

However, raw frame rates simply do not convey the complete gaming experience and this has been especially illustrated with multi-GPU, where otherwise satisfactory frame rates may feel much slower than then they should due to uneven delivery of frames. And now we see this unevenness or “jitter” on single GPUs in some games.

One thing to note is that we have overclocked our Core i7-3770K CPU to 4.5GHz to make sure that there is no CPU bottleneck. We are testing at 1920×1080 with a 120Hz display versus at 60Hz, and we shall also test at 2560×1600 and 5760×1080. We are testing Resident Evil 6 demo benchmark using 3xHQAA with maximum (High) DX9c details; the highest available in the benchmark demo. We are benching with GeForce (WHQL/Launch) 314.70/314.90 drivers and with the very latest Catalyst 13.2 Beta 6 and the latest CAPs.

Let’s check out our hardware and software used for this part of our ongoing evaluation testing gaming smoothness of Resident Evil 6 benchmark.