Results: Tomb Raider
AMD’s Radeon HD 7990 pushes the highest practical frame rate, losing some of the card’s rendering effort to runts and drops. It does significantly better than two Radeon HD 7970s in CrossFire, though, which get hammered by the number of runts that only show up on-screen for a couple of milliseconds. Prototype software helps the 7990 a little. But because Tomb Raider is the fourth title with latency-specific optimizations already rolled in to Catalyst 13.3, it’s possible that a lot of the gains are already baked-in.
The thin, dotted lines again reflect hardware frame rates, while solid lines are indicative of what you actually see once runts and dropped frames get disregarded.
Although it incurs the highest 95th percentile latency, AMD Radeon HD 7990 with Catalyst 13.5 Beta 2 yields better average frame time variance than the other two Radeon-based data points.
Unfortunately, while those numbers seem fairly low, volunteers we brought in to test routinely fingered the Radeon HD 7990 as less consistent than GeForce GTX 690 after swapping between platforms armed with both cards.