Radeon HD 7990 And GeForce GTX 690: Bring Out The Big Guns

Micro-Stuttering: The Current Situation

Micro-Stuttering Benchmarks Revisited

About one year ago, we published Micro-Stuttering And GPU Scaling In CrossFire And SLI. That article is still a good introduction for anyone unfamiliar with this issue. We felt it was time to revisit micro-stuttering to see if it's any less of a problem today. Although Sleeping Dogs is a title evangelized by AMD, it's modern and scales well under graphics card combinations from both AMD and Nvidia.

The large spikes you see in each chart happen when the benchmark changes scenes, and can safely be ignored.

SLI: Overall and Detailed Views

CrossFire: Overall and Detailed Views

Nvidia’s SLI technology is clearly better at minimizing frame times in this benchmark scenario. Even without its Adaptive VSync capability enabled, EVGA's GeForce GTX 690 produces a much smoother output than the Radeon HD 7990.

The higher latencies you see on AMD's card are very much noticeable during gameplay, manifesting as stuttering and skipped frames. Meanwhile, SLI appears much closer to what a single GPU working on its own achieves, though it doesn't quite get there.

Now that we've quantified the extensive micro-stuttering suffered by two Tahiti GPUs in CrossFire, we're going to try doing something about it by experimenting with different rendering methods in the Catalyst driver and overwriting AMD's default CrossFire profile.

The Four Benchmark Game Scenarios

  • mayankleoboy1
    IMHO, the GTX690 looks best. There is something really alluring about shiny white metallic shine and the fine metal mesh. Along with the fluorescent green branding.
    Maybe i am too much of a retro SF buff :)
    Reply
  • Ironslice
    What's the most impressive is that the GTX 690 was made by nVidia themselves and not an OEM. Very nice and balanced card.
    Reply
  • tacoslave
    i wept
    Reply
  • hellfire24
    your test system is sexy!!!!!!!
    Reply
  • willyroc
    You can't really go wrong either way with these generally insane(so to speak) cards.
    Reply
  • amuffin
    Is it just me or do the 7970X2 and 7990 coolers look so fast and fugly? :heink:
    Reply
  • thanks for the in depth analysis with adaptive V-sync and radeon pro helping with micro stutter.

    not to take away anything for the hard work performed; i would have liked have seen nvidia's latest beta driver, 310.33, included also to see if nvidia is doing anything to improve the performance of their card instead of just adding 3d vision, AO, and sli profiles.
    Reply
  • esrever
    can we get some quadfire benchmarks too? :D
    Reply
  • RazorBurn
    AMD's Dual GPU at 500+ Watts of electricity is out for me.. Too Much Power and Noise..
    Reply
  • mohit9206
    2 670's in sli is better than spending on a 690 and 2 7950's in Xfire is better than spending on a 7990. this way you save nearly $300 both ways
    Reply