Frame Latency Spikes Plague Radeon Graphics Cards 158
crookedvulture writes "AMD is bundling a stack of the latest games with graphics cards like its Radeon HD 7950. One might expect the Radeon to perform well in those games, and it does. Sort of. The Radeon posts high FPS numbers, the metric commonly used to measure graphics performance. However, it doesn't feel quite as smooth as the competing Nvidia solution, which actually scores lower on the FPS scale. This comparison of the Radeon HD 7950 and GeForce 660 Ti takes a closer look at individual frame latencies to explain why. Turns out the Radeon suffers from frequent, measurable latency spikes that noticeably disrupt the smoothness of animation without lowering the FPS average substantially. This trait spans multiple games, cards, and operating systems, and it's 'raised some alarms' internally at AMD. Looks like Radeons may have problems with smooth frame delivery in new games despite boasting competitive FPS averages."
Re:Once again, a single measurement.... (Score:2, Informative)
The new measurement for graphics cards is ms/frame, and it's been used on some review sites for more than a year now.
Re:Once again, a single measurement.... (Score:3, Informative)
How bout next time you RTFA. For the past year or so, that site has scatter plots showing frame render times in milliseconds; they show time and time again that despite similar FPS rates, performance isn't the same.
Re:nVidia (Score:4, Informative)
For a long time nvidia may have had the FPS crown, but the how the actual graphics looked on a radeon were MUCH better.
Quality vs Quantity, as seen here:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/graphics/display/quality_vs_quantity_3.html [xbitlabs.com] https://www.nordichardware.com/Graphics/ati-radeon-x1950xtx-part-1/Image-Quality.html [nordichardware.com]
-americamatrix
The sky is falling... ? (Score:5, Informative)
Anyone that actually knows anything about the GPU industry knows that both AMD and NVIDIA graphics suffer from these latency spikes, but it's not with all their SKUs. NVIDIA's 660 Ti works well in this case, but their 670 and 680 has more latency spikes than the competitive AMD cards do. The 7850 demonstrated here is an anomaly for AMD. None of their other cards do this. Look at past reviews from Techreport and you will see what I mean.
Re:CPU Backup (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Once again, a single measurement.... (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, the new part is that they are taking the 99th percentile of the ms/frame, which gives something like 'the worst fps you can expect 99% of the time' type of measure..
Summary is Misleading (Score:5, Informative)
"This trait spans multiple games, cards, and operating systems, "
First of all the article only tests 2 cards accross Win7 and Win8. Considering that Win8 is basically just Win7 SP2, it's hardly fair to make that statement. Micro-stuttering an issue that mainly affects multi-GPU cards. Both Nvidia and ATI have had issues with this in their SLI and Crossfire cards. You can read more about it here:
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1317582 [hardforum.com]
Re:Once again, a single measurement.... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:nVidia (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The sky is falling... ? (Score:5, Informative)
As clearly seen on page 3 [techreport.com] of the 670's review.