Results: Grid 2
Without frame pacing enabled and running at 5760x1080, AMD clearly has some issues in Grid 2. This was evident in Don’s data at 2560x1440, too, where the Radeon HD 7990 suffered a number of performance dips down into territory that was certainly palpable. We’re able to use the word certainly because nobody preferred the 7990, two gamers couldn’t tell a difference, and four unknowingly chose the GeForce GTX 690.
Frame pacing appears to add notable consistency to the 7990’s performance. We see it in the subjective results, as most of our participants didn’t prefer one card over the other, one picked AMD, and two chose Nvidia.
We can also switch over to Don’s numbers at 2560x1440 and see that, although frame pacing knocks some of the peaks off of AMD’s previous drivers, by also eliminating the extreme performance dips, average frame rates persist, as the minimums come way up. Frame time variance shrinks, which is probably why more of our attendees leaned closer to AMD after the first part of our experiment.
