Results: Metro: Last Light
Previously, Radeon cards in CrossFire yielded excellent results in Metro 2033. Does that trend continue in Metro: Last Light?
Our first set of tests with the game's built-in benchmark suggested almost identical performance between the Radeon HD 7990 and GeForce GTX 690:
I was set to publish those results when Chris Angelini let me know about a performance issue that almost every one of his event attendees pointed out in actual gameplay. Re-benchmarking the game revealed the problematic behavior:
The Radeon configurations clearly encounter some sort of problem. Existing the game and reloading this level helps smooth out the frame rates again, but choppy performance returns soon after.
It seems clear that this isn't a frame pacing issue, but rather some other bug (perhaps a CrossFire compatibility problem in Metro: Last Light?). As such, the following results highlight our findings, and hopefully help AMD fix the culprit as soon as possible.
Catalyst 13.8 actually demonstrates worse frame time variance, though this is almost certainly affected by whatever underlying issue is hammering performance to begin with.