Exploring “Frame time” measurement – Part 3 – the GTX 680 versus the HD 7970 GHz Edition
Heaven 3.0 – Unigine
Finally we come to our last benchmark, Heaven 3.0, on the Unigine engine. It uses DX11 and heavy tessellation which will strain any graphics card. One DX11 game based on Unigine was released next year, Oil Rush. We use the setting for “extreme tessellation” and high shaders and we also set AF to 16x.
Here is Heaven 3.0 benchmark with maxed settings, extreme tessellation and 4xAA at 1920×1080:
It certainly appears that just as with the Jane Nash scene, the Heaven 3.0 benchmark has been optimized for frame rates and not smoothness. Let’s first check out the frame time chart for the GTX 680:
Now the HD 7970 GHz frame time chart:
The HD 7970 GHz edition chart shows more spikes and some with larger amplitude. Here is the GTX 680 ranking:
Next is the HD 7970 GHz edition rank:
Unigine engine is used in one PC game but the benchmark has been quite popular and well-optimized for by AMD and by Nvidia. The Radeon shows a bit more jittery behavior in this benchmark than the GeForce and we shall again return to check it in future benching.
Nice Test. Next one will be in Crossfire/SLi ?
Btw. You’re gonna redo this whole test parcour when AMD releases this new anti Microstutter driver ? http://techreport.com/news/24136/driver-software-blamed-for-radeon-frame-latency-troubles-to-be-fixed-with-updates
Thank-you. The next planned evaluation is a continuation of the GTX 680 vs HD 7970 GHz benching using the rest of our 30 game suite. We are also going to revisit these same tests after AMD releases new drivers.
this was pretty great. I love the ranking. While there a a few extreme cases where AMD is obviously having issues, looking at older games we see that not all hope is lost. AMD obviously is capable of smoothness and we do see several cases where they do better than nvidia. These may be older titles but its a great sign that this is very fixable. The troubling issue is how bad AMD performs in some of these newer games. Its off the chart!
Its especially dramatic when you look back at the games AMD was smoother in and look at the major ugly instances.
This review shows that AMD is capable of producing smooth gaming. I think we will see them address this and perhaps the tables might turn in AMDs favor. Now wouldnt that be fun! I am getting ahead of myself here. We should wait to see how it all pans out first before i start dreaming, lol.
Great work!!!