Exploring “Frame time” measurement – Part 3 – the GTX 680 versus the HD 7970 GHz Edition
CRYSIS
Next we move on to Crysis, a science fiction first person shooter by Crytek. After all these years, it remains one of the most demanding games for any PC and it is also still one of the most beautiful games released to date. Crysis is based in a fictional near-future where an alien spacecraft is discovered buried on an island near the coast of Korea. The single-player campaign has you assume the role of USA Delta Force, ‘Nomad’ who is armed with futuristic weapons and equipment.
Crysis uses DirectX10 for graphics rendering. CryEngine2 is the game engine used to power Crysis. As well as supporting Shader Model 2.0, 3.0, and DirectX10’s 4.0, CryEngine2 is also multi-threaded to take advantage of dual core SMP-aware systems and Crytek has developed their own proprietary physics system, called CryPhysics. However, it is noted that actually playing this game is a bit slower than the demo implies. All of our settings are set to the in-game maximum’s “very high” including 4xAA for 1920×1080 and we force 16xAF in the control panels.
Here is Crysis’ Island Demo benchmark GPU. Lets’s look at the frame time chart for the GTX 680.
Crysis also appears to have been more optimized for frame rates and not as much for smoothness. Now check out the frame time chart for the HD 7970 GHz edition.
Here is the GTX 680 ranking:
Now the HD 7970 ranking:
- Average time: Average time across the entire run
- 1% time: Time it takes to draw 99% of frames
- 0.1%: Time it takes to draw 99.9% of frames
The HD 7970 at GHz speeds is slightly faster, however the mimimums and average are higher; the amount of spikes are similar and neither runs are particularly smooth. Let’s move on to Far Cry 2.
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!!!