AMD Catalyst "Frame Pacing" Driver Results Thread

[d1nky]

thats his opinion not FACT tho.........

and how about the people who run 3 or 4 AMD cards and dont see a thing?! it means nothing to me, the only reason i havent bought a second card was because i thought it would be stuttering like crazy (wasted money), tested it out and seems there no problems.

edited for ya dave

 

[cadaveca]

thats his opinion not FACT tho.........

Nah, it's fact. It's not a fact that reflects negatively upon anyone, however, unless you feel that you need to be better than everyone else. Which you don't, by the way. No different comparing a pro athlete to a "normal person". That athlete can run, jump, whatever better than the average person, maybe those that see issues can SEE better than the average person.

 

[erocker]

The purpose of this thread is quite clear. If you don't have anything relevant to add don't post. I don't want this thread mucked up with off topic bickering, off hand comments, trolling or otherwise.

General warning given.

 

[d1nky]

i have a on subject question, does framelatency/microstutter scale or get worse with more cards?

 

[cadaveca]

General warning given.

Should lock the thread until the driver comes out. Can't have any results until then anyway.

i have a on subject question, does framelatency/microstutter scale or get worse with more cards?

It seems to depend on how the cards are loaded(in other words, depends on the app). For 5- and 6-series Crossfire, 3 cards seemed to be "most optimal" compared to two or four, for end users experience. Never quite understood why. I heard many people report that three was better, so tried it myself, did seem to work.

 

[crishan]

@cadaveca:

I guess what you wanted to express, instead of "mentally..." was "perceptually", as
there are quite a lot of people who do not perceive microstuttering.

Also, "perceptually" doesn't quite feel as

 

[cadaveca]

@cadaveca:

I guess what you wanted to express, instead of "mentally..." was "perceptually", as
there are quite a lot of people who do not perceive microstuttering.

Also, "perceptually" doesn't quite feel as

Ha, you're absolutely right. editing...

 

[NdMk2o1o]

meh. And yeah, I knew EXACTLY what I was posting and how it would be interpreted. You should expect that of my posts ALWAYS. I just simply put that out there early, since I truly believe that if there was no problem at all, as many would like to say, then AMD would not be working on this driver in the first place, since it'd be one huge waste of money. If you ignore that fact, that AMD is spending lots of cash on this issue, then yeah, I think you're mentally challenged, and I don't think there's anything wrong with saying so. I was directing my comments at any specific person, at all.

There's informing, then there's being an arrogant arsehole and believing your own hype, guess which camp you fall into my friend? also, haven't you lost credibility having been banned from several forums in the past because of your views?

I don't doubt your knowledge, though your arrogance is amazing to watch (pride, my greatest sin : Devils Advocate ) a lot of people look up to you, I really think you should refrain from calling some of them retards and learn how to compose yourself a little bit better being an advocate for TPU.

 

[cadaveca]

There's informing, then there's being an arrogant arsehole and believing your own hype, guess which camp you fall into my friend? also, haven't you lost credibility having been banned from several forums in the past because of your views?

I don't doubt your knowledge, though your arrogance is amazing to watch (pride, my greatest sin : Devils Advocate ) a lot of people look up to you, I really think you should refrain from calling some of them retards and learn how to compose yourself a little bit better being an advocate for TPU.

meh. Differences in culture almost always guarantee you cannot keep everyone happy. So I am what I am, and don't try to change myself to match others, like AMD is doing with these drivers. We speak differently, is all, just like we have users that post with little English skills.

BTW, I'm not banned off of many forums, just hardwarecanucks(I was staff, didn't get along with management, was banned so I didn't remove my posts when I quit) and legitreviews(nate ran a contest and gave me the run-around after he shipped my prize to the second place user). Credibility lost? Where? Credibility trying to be gained, where?

Which is interesting to me, since there is supposed to be a switch in these drivers that lets the end user choose which they like best, so all users get what they want. Comparing results between those switches will be interesting.

 

[Durvelle27]

will run some test myself

 

[RCoon]

Too little too late, especially for people like me who ran good quality crossfire setups, and then switched to greens because of the issue. The news saying it would be available later this week, while being nice for a timeframe, is just yet another slap in the face to the people waiting on this driver.
Runt frames are an issue across the board, and I'm not just talking about graphs. There is just something about paying for hardware, and then you know, being told you're getting 120 frames, but actually half of those frames arent even making it. Its like lying about frames essentially.
If you dont notice it, then I'm very happy for you, and I hope you enjoy your AMD setups, because apart from this issue, they are generally extremely capable and very well priced. But, for me, on 144hz monitors, runt frames are a big issue. I play high FPS, and I like to actually get those frames.

Hopefully a day will come when this isnt an issue, but I can guarantee, in 10 years time the troll wars of red vs green will now include "remember that time when AMD had sh*t fps latency issues"

 

[d1nky]

i havent read a single article or heard of one piece of credible information that its a persons perception of microstutter tho.

rcoon touched on a good point tho about it being in relation to monitor frequency and framerate.

maybe i dont see it because i have a 60hz flatscreen with vsync locked on HAHA

 

[Durvelle27]

i havent read a single article or heard of one piece of credible information that its a persons perception of microstutter tho.

rcoon touched on a good point tho about it being in relation to monitor frequency and framerate.

maybe i dont see it because i have a 60hz flatscreen with vsync locked on HAHA

I don't see it and i don't use V-Sync at all and my monitor is 75Hz

 

[cadaveca]

i havent read a single article or heard of one piece of credible information that its a persons perception of microstutter tho.

rcoon touched on a good point tho about it being in relation to monitor frequency and framerate.

maybe i dont see it because i have a 60hz flatscreen with vsync locked on HAHA

well, in the past, we needed multiple card to get 60 FPS, so anything that could be done to get there was perceived as OK. Today, we have cards that can do it all on their own, so when you add a second card, and frame seem to be less than the 60FPS you had with one card, the issues stands out more, as well as what RCoon mentioned with 60Hz+ screens.

 

[7950 Flex]

Tomb Raider

Hey I played Tomb Raider on my 7950 and there were 3 settings that could bring down my fps.
1. Tressfx- When the camera zoomed in on her hair during cutscenes or otherwise this would cut my fps in half.
2. Shadows- Had to turn down the shadows a little bit but I have issues with shadows in many games, don't know why but It's probably my CPU i7 2.6ghz.
3. Sometimes when I was outside looking into the distance with level of detail set to max I would drop from 60fps to 50fps.

Besides those 3 the game ran flawlessly at 60fps and I didn't even OC the card. It was at its factory OC boost 925mhz core 1250 mem.

 

[RCoon]

i havent read a single article or heard of one piece of credible information that its a persons perception of microstutter tho.

rcoon touched on a good point tho about it being in relation to monitor frequency and framerate.

maybe i dont see it because i have a 60hz flatscreen with vsync locked on HAHA

Yeah, obviously lets imagine you're playing a game. Your PC is very capable, and you have a max frame of say, 172, and a minimum frame (explosions, particle effects, etc) of 45. Obviously you're going to notice going from 144 (max FPS on monitor) down to 45, but with AMD and the latency issue, what you're actually likely going to experience, is going from 119(25 runt frames) down to say, (10 runt frames)35, which is not a factual estimate but a general idea. I always turn vsync off, though I'm not aware of how the runt frames are affected by vsync, or over-rendering frames up to say 172.

All I know is, I spent dozens of hours in skyrim jittering along. My framerates were capped at 59 too.

EDIT: To be fair, if you're playing at 1080p on one monitor, you could run games at max on a single 7970 and have severely less runt frames than if you crossfired. You're still capped at 60hz, so two cards would almost be pointless, but as I said earlier, there are a lot of people with different setups, monitors, resolutions etc, and getting worse framerates at 60hz with more cards is just not acceptable.

 

[d1nky]

benchmarks 3d tests with two cards are like that, stutter like friggin crazy.

but i didnt think that was microstutter, as microstutter is meant to be very minute. like several milliseconds of latency.

oh and with vsync off its like fps heaven, just with tearing hell. lol

 

[Durvelle27]

benchmarks 3d tests with two cards are like that, stutter like friggin crazy.

but i didnt think that was microstutter, as microstutter is meant to be very minute. like several milliseconds of latency.

oh and with vsync off its like fps heaven, just with tearing hell. lol

Funny thing is i don't get screen tearing when FPS is above 120 even though my monitor is only 75Hz. I wonder why though

 

[cadaveca]

benchmarks 3d tests with two cards are like that, stutter like friggin crazy.

but i didnt think that was microstutter, as microstutter is meant to be very minute. like several milliseconds of latency.

try early 2013 drivers with the new 3DMark (13.1, 13.2, etc), and you can see the stutter in just the FPS readings, even with a single card(since you can zoom into the results graph). And supporting more than two cards in that bench with those drivers...forgeddaboutit. Current drivers are much better.

You can also see in that benchmark that the "stutter" isn't always full-screen. the space test, there's fire or some such stuff in the background in the top left of the screen, that area was bad for stutter for quite some time.

That's part of the problem with "microstutter", and discussing the issue, since there are many problem that can be thought of as "Microstutter", but are really something else.

At times, I think of these "runt frames" as just tearing, even.

 

[RCoon]

oh and with vsync of its like fps heaven, just with tearing hell. lol

This is one of my issues with everything vsync in games. Some games hate vsync, some games hate unlimited framerates. Its supposed to smooth things, not make them worse!
Again, anything more than 59 FPS in skyrim, the game goes batsh*t crazy and hurls baskets and cheese at your head and one shots you (seriously, play it at 144FPS, it happens)

That's part of the problem with "microstutter", and discussing the issue, since there are many problem that can be thought of as "Microstutter", but are really something else.

At times, I think of these "runt frames" as just tearing, even.

Also this. I'm unsure if the whole population of gamers discussing GPU's actually knows what microstutter looks and feels like. The motion sickness description is perfect though, especially in my experience.

 

[cadaveca]

I'm unsure if the whole population of gamers discussing GPU's actually knows what microstutter looks and feels like.

I have probalby spent more time that most users talking and researching this issue, and I SITLL don't know exactly WTF is going on. But AMD does seem to, so I am eager to try this driver and see if it fixes things for me. If it doesn't, I'll be selling some AMD card, because I got GTX670 SLI, and it doesn't bother me at all like Crossfire does.

 

[the54thvoid]

On a PR front if AMD don't get it right with these massively overdue drivers they're going to take some knock down in their credibility.

What I'm keen to see is how the fps will be hit from removing the runt frames. i.e. if a crossfire combo gives 100fps but 25 are runt frames then the new drivers should show 75fps (if it's completely sorted the issue).

In FRAPS terms we may see a perceived hit in performance when in actual fact it will be showing what it was always physically displaying on screen.

I'm looking forward to the analysis.

 

[RCoon]

I have probalby spent more time that most users talking and researching this issue, and I SITLL don't know exactly WTF is going on. But AMD does seem to, so I am eager to try this driver and see if it fixes things for me. If it doesn't, I'll be selling some AMD card, because I got GTX670 SLI, and it doesn't bother me at all like Crossfire does.

I'm sure I'll go back to AMD in a couple of years when I've had my fun with the 780(maybe SLI), in the meantime I'm just going to sit back and see how this pans out. I actually hope they fix it TBH.

On a PR front if AMD don't get it right with these massively overdue drivers they're going to take some knock down in their credibility.

What I'm keen to see is how the fps will be hit from removing the runt frames. i.e. if a crossfire combo gives 100fps but 25 are runt frames then the new drivers should show 75fps (if it's completely sorted the issue).

In FRAPS terms we may see a perceived hit in performance when in actual fact it will be showing what it was always physically displaying on screen.

I'm looking forward to the analysis.

I'd rather they made the latency far lower, so when it reports 100, you get 100, instead of merely saying "well screw it, they dont see 'em so lets hide 'em before they get that far!" There has to be some sort of middle ground for this issue. So instead of 100 and 25 runt, you'd get 90 actual frames with the remaining 10 removed by improving latency.

 

[cadaveca]

I actually hope they fix it TBH.

I do too, because I'm dropping another $500 on a second ASUS 7970 Matrix card ASAP if they do. That card is far and above my favorite out of the ones I got here, and that setup will look awesome in my Maximus VI Formula.

Otherwise, I'm sticking to a single dual-slot GPU, and doing mITX gaming. If AMD can't do dual-GPU right, I don't want Nvidia's either, because the way I see it, the only reason AMD cannot fix this would be due to patents that NVidia holds.

I guess someone should post some results with current drivers to set a baseline. Single GPU, then dual GPU, maybe. Then with the new driver, so we can directly compare the differences. I'd kind of like to see if it's any different on AMD vs. Intel CPUs, too.

 

[RCoon]

I do too, because I'm dropping another $500 on a second ASUS 7970 Matrix card ASAP if they do. That card is far and above my favorite out of the ones I got here, and that setup will look awesome in my Maximus VI Formula.

Otherwise, I'm sticking to a single dual-slot GPU, and doing mITX gaming. If AMD can't do dual-GPU right, I don't want Nvidia's either, because the way I see it, the only reason AMD cannot fix this would be due to patents that NVidia holds.

I tried to make a 4670k + 780 ITX system in the bitfenix prodigy, but A) the Asus ITX board wasnt out in time (that sexy one you showed pictures of the other day) and B) the guy who I was supposed to sell my whole rig to pulled out at the last minute (his mom talked him out of it, i mean seriously, HIS MOM?!). I'd still like to do it, I'm fairly bored of Full Tower now, I need portability and some space nowadays. Also it's nice to be neat.

I think I almost bought a 7970 Matrix from one of the guys on here a year ago... They look awesome, and the cooler is sublime.