Results: Hitman: Absolution
Resolution: 1920x1080
Strong average frame rates and very similar minimums might suggest that Hitman: Absolution is largely platform-bound, even at its Ultra quality preset. Bottlenecked though this resolution might be, the fact that AMD’s Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition beats Nvidia’s GeForce GTX Titan is a nice little victory for the Tahiti-based card.
Only the GeForce GTX 680 lags behind when we isolate frame rates over time. It’s also interesting that the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition, despite its solid average performance, appears to achieve its average result through somewhat more erratic dips and spikes.
GeForce GTX Titan exhibits very low latencies between frames, all the way through the 95th percentile we’re reporting. None of these numbers are bad though, particularly since all of the frame rates are fairly high.
Resolution: 2560x1600
A higher resolution imparts more of a graphics workload, and our Hitman numbers start separating out a bit.
GeForce GTX 690 maintains its top billing, followed by Titan. Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition drops to third, maintaining its lead over GeForce GTX 680.
The finishing order is quite clear, looking at frame rate over time.
We checked these numbers multiple times—GeForce GTX 680 exhibited higher average consecutive frame latency at 1920x1080 than it does at 2560x1600, while Titan’s latency increased more substantially.
But the bigger news is that AMD’s Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition again shows a relatively low average latency that starts to balloon above the 95th percentile.
Resolution: 5760x1200
Shifting to 5760x1200 taxes all four graphics cards quite a bit. The GeForce GTX 690 appears to maintain a playable average, and its minimum frame rate of 35 is better than Titan’s average frame rate of 34.
Plotting frame rates over time doesn’t add anything; average FPS already made it pretty clear that the single-GPU cards struggle with this combination of high resolution and high-end detail settings.
Frame rate is more of an issue than consecutive frame latency, though it is notable that AMD’s Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition exceeds 40 ms in our 95th percentile calculation.