Results: Grid 2
Aside from Battlefield 4, Grid 2 is the other game that previously benchmarked poorly, demonstrating negative scaling. The original prognosis was that this typically-platform-bound title was maxed out by a pair of Hawaii GPUs, and the overhead of two more hurt performance. Again, a spiky frame rate over time graph seemed to corroborate.
The same troubleshooting that helped knock the Battlefield 4 numbers into line works here as well. FCAT shows the in-game benchmark averaging 152 FPS and Fraps says 156. There are dropped frames observable in the FCAT output, so this checks out. Still, we end up with 55% scaling, and that’s not bad for a title often held back by processor and system memory performance.
Even though frame rates peak above 200 FPS and dip under 120, Grid 2 runs smoothly at 3840x2160. This isn’t one of the games we’d worry about with regard to stuttering. Unfortunately, the second Radeon R9 295X2 also isn’t needed for an enjoyable experience, even with the Ultra preset applied. A pair of Hawaii GPUs is already capable of 98 FPS on average, after all.
The performance of all five configurations is so high that even a last-place showing in the frame time variance chart is perfectly acceptable for two Radeon R9 295X2s. At worst, you’re looking at a 95th percentile figure under 2 ms.
This is what that looks like on a line over time. There are some clear examples where the time between two frames spikes, but every combination of cards experiences that on occasion. The higher average variance comes from the underlying trend, which you can see as the red line consistently peeking up over the other colors along the bottom.
