Challenging FPS: Testing SLI And CrossFire Using Video Capture

Reference
By published

What if the performance data you used for deciding which graphics card to buy was flawed? We're taking a deeper look at some of the problems with benchmarking multi-GPU configs using conventional tools. Nvidia's new FCAT suite helps us collect more info.

Results: Far Cry 3

Performance-wise, these settings favor Nvidia's cards, which yield identical numbers for our actual and practical frame rates. The Radeon boards see 3.4 FPS between those same two measurements. Correlating with Fraps gives us a results that'd predictably come close to what the Radeon cards are actually rendering.

As before, we see spikes from what AMD's cards are actually rendering, which includes the dropped and runt frames.

The spikiness from AMD's Radeon cards can be demonstrated by looking at frame time variance. At the 95th percentile, we can see that frames aren't being delivered as consistently. I did notice the game felt a little laggier, too.

Don Woligroski
Contributor

Don Woligroski was a former senior hardware editor for Tom's Hardware. He has covered a wide range of PC hardware topics, including CPUs, GPUs, system building, and emerging technologies.