Exploring “Frame time” measurement – Part 3 – the GTX 680 versus the HD 7970 GHz Edition
FarCry 2
Far Cry 2 uses the name of the original Far Cry but it is not connected to the first game as it brings you a new setting and a new story. There is also a third game, Far Cry 3, which is also published by Ubisoft whose devs created it based on their Dunia Engine. The game setting takes place in an unnamed African country, during an uprising between two rival warring factions. Your mission is to kill “The Jackal”; the Nietzsche-quoting mercenary that arms both sides of the conflict that you are dropped into.
The Far Cry 2 game world is loaded in the background and on the fly to create a completely seamless open world. The Dunia game engine provides good visuals that scale well. One thing to especially note is Far Cry 2’s very realistic fire propagation . First we test Far Cry 2 benchmark at 1920×1080 with AI enabled and we use the Ranch Long benchmark with ultra settings plus 8xAA. This is a change from our earlier benching in Parts 1 and 2 where we used the Ranch Short. The Frafs benchmark viewer cuts off the benchmark at 3,000 frames
Here are the settings we chose:
Let’s go right to the graphs and first check the frame times using the GTX 680
Now the frame time chart for the HD 7970 GHz edition:
Now check out the ranking chart for the GTX 680 SSD:
Now the Ranch Long ranking with the HD 7970 GHz edition:
- 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
Neither of them are particularly smooth, however, the Radeon has higher spikes more often and you can often see the jitter.
Let’s move to Resident Evil 5 which appears to be a smooth high fps gaming experience even on a medium enthusiast PC.
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!!!