See full article @ http://www.techngaming.com/home/news/te ... sting-r748Reveals CrossFire and Eyefinity runt + dropped frames, damning AMD
We're all familiar with Fraps style frame rate performance benchmarking when reviewing how well a graphics card or CPU runs a game, which one sees on any graphics card review today. You get some nice bar charts showing how fast the thing went, usually with a variation of average, minimum or maximum frame rates and sometimes a framerate plot over time for a fuller picture.
This system has served the gaming community well for over a decade now and gives a good indication of performance, but it doesn't tell the whole story, especially with multi-card setups. This is because it doesn't show how well individual frames are rendered and doesn't expose important problems such as runt frames and microstuttering, which can compromise the animation making it jerky, even when the raw GPU horsepower is there. Microstuttering is particularly relevant to multi-card setups too, SLI from NVIDIA and CrossFire from AMD. AMD in particular, has some questions to answer regarding runt frames and dropped frames in CrossFire setups, which we'll get to later.
Enter PC Perspective's Ryan Shrout with a new testing system and methodology designed to look at individual frames that he calls "Frame Rating" which takes a really close look at the true performance of any single graphics card or cards running in tandem. It's a financially expensive system to set up and a complex system to understand, so I'll just give a brief(ish) overview here and let Ryan explain it all fully in his article, which is well worth a read.
It turns out that the framerate in games which Fraps captures may not be the true framerate that's output to your monitor, which is due to the complex nature of creating frames when rendering a game's scene. The block diagram below shows...
I didn't know i have bad crossfire performance in Crysis 3...
to me it has been absolutely smooth.