Exploring “Frame time” measurement – Part 1 – Is Fraps a good tool?

Posted by apoppin On December 30, 2012 5 Comments

Conclusion

This has been quite an enjoyable hands-on experience comparing Fraps frame time runs with three game engines actual reporting of frame times. We feel reasonably confident as we proceed that Fraps is as useful a tool in reporting frame times as it is is for frame rates. It is not perfect, but it conveys a reasonable assessment of what is actually being experienced in-game by the user regarding smoothness or its lack.

We also like Frafs Benchmark Viewer as a simple and easy tool to create nearly instant graphs out of Fraps frame time runs. We plan to continue to use this tool as we explore “smoothness” by measuring frame times, relating them to frame rates and perhaps posting Youtube videos of our own GTX 680 versus Radeon HD 7970 side-by-side runs at 60 fields per second, 120 fps, and 240 fps.

If you would like to weigh in on our future testing methods or to specifically discuss micro stutter and frame time testing methods, feel free to comment below, ask questions, make requests, or have a detailed discussion at ABT forum.

Stay tuned, there is a lot coming from us at ABT including Part Two of “Exploring Frame Time Measurement”. Don’t miss it this week as we compare the GTX 680 versus the HD 7970 as to smoothness. Stay tuned to ABT for the latest regular news and Top Apps, as well as a Genius PC 2.0 and 4.0 speaker evaluation as well as a Newer Technology Voyager USB 2.0/3.0 Drive Dock test drive.

Happy gaming and Happy New Year!

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TOPICS FPS frafs bench viewer frame rates frame time Fraps gtx 680 HD 7970 measurement smoothness

ocre

wow. These results are extremely similar. More so than i ever thought. Fraps result do differ by a tiny amount but this is because the game engine and fraps grab their data completely different. Fraps monitors DX/openCL calls after the fact and it being an external program throws in its own latencies, however small they may be. But through all this the trend graphs show near identical trends for fraps vs the internal game engines. Its amazingly accurate and the results are like mirror images.

Some people may not know the point in these testings so to be clear i might add it. Most games do not have any way to gather frame times from the engine at all. Fraps can do this rather easily anytime while playing or benchmarking. The question was whether fraps was accurate enough to rely on at all. Whether the spikes meant what they were being represented as. Having these test with the game engines producing near identical trend graphs gives high credence to fraps being an acceptable tool to capture frame times. We also have the reviewers experience which seemed to align with the frame time data very nicely. He seen the small hitching or studdering that the trend charts represent.
Pancake

It’s remarkably easy, actually. Fraps and in game timing work by time stamping the ‘swap buffer’ command which indicates end of frame. As the timestamp is an internal CPU counter the only difference would be either side of procedure call so both would differ by at most a few nanoseconds. Fraps would be at most a few kilobytes of code mostly being a stub for forwarding calls to the ‘real’ driver.
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Exploring “Frame time” measurement – Part 1 – Is Fraps a good tool?

Conclusion

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