Results: 3DMark
Whenever I jump into my car, I like to let my oil temperature get to 80 degrees before I start flogging the engine. Consider 3DMark today’s warm-up, leading into some very spirited driving. AMD claims supremacy in this synthetic metric, as we’d expect it to given outright impressive performance specifications.
The real question is whether a lead in Futuremark’s title bears out in the rest of benchmark suite once we start factoring out dropped and runt frames, which don’t positively affect gaming, but still would have been counted toward the average frame rate in Fraps.
Talk about precision. The Fire Strike score gives us the exact hierarchy we would have predicted based on each solution’s specs. Indeed, the Radeon HD 7990 claims its first-place finish.
But we know this means little outside of bragging rights. Let’s load up a 256 GB SSD full of eight top gaming titles and start recording 430 MB/s of raw video at 2560x1440 to analyze using the FCAT tool suite.
And by the way, a number of readers have asked for access to the FCAT extractor tool and Perl scripts, eager to dig in and confirm that they’re above-board. If you’d like to get your hands on the tool, just let me know.
