Exploring “Frame time” measurement – Part 3 – the GTX 680 versus the HD 7970 GHz Edition

STALKER, Call of Pripyat

S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Call of Pripyat became a new DX11 benchmark for us after GSC Game World released a another story expansion to the original Shadows of Chernobyl. It is the third game in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series. All of these games have non-linear storylines which feature role-playing game elements and “a living breathing world” with highly developed NPC creature AI.

Call of Pripyat utilizes the XRAY 1.6 Engine using DirectX 11 and real-time GPU tesselation. It features Shader model 3.0 & 4.0 graphics engine featuring HDR, parallax and normal mapping, soft shadows, motion blur, weather effects and day-to-night cycles. As with other engines using deferred shading, the original DX9c X-ray Engine does not support anti-aliasing with dynamic lighting enabled, although the DX10 and DX 11 versions do.

We are using the stand-alone benchmark by Clear Sky’s creator and we picked the most stressful test out of the four, “Sun shafts”. It brings the heaviest penalty due to its extreme use of shaders to create DX10/DX10.1 and DX11 effects. We ran this benchmark fully maxed out in DX11.0 with “ultra” settings plus 2xAA, including applying edge-detect MSAA which chokes performance even further. Here we present our maxed out DX11 settings for S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Call of Pripyat DX11 benchmark with 2xAA at 1920×1080:

Let’s go right to the charts and run this benchmark on a GTX 680 to see the frame time delivery:

Here are the HD 7970 at stock speeds frametimes:

Here is the HD 7970 GHz edition frame time chart; it had higher frame rates but also larger spikes.

Here is the GTX 680 OWC SSD ranking:

Here is the HD 7970 at stock speeds ranking:

Here is the HD 7970 GHz 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

Both of these video cards run with noticeable jitter in sections of this benchmark.  Overclocking to GHz edition speeds does not change much with the HD 7970.