Far Cry 3
Far Cry 3 (DirectX 11)
Beyond the reach of civilization lies a lawless island ruled by violence. This is where you find yourself stranded, caught in a bloody conflict between psychotic warlords and indigenous rebels. Encounter a disturbed and memorable cast of characters as you take a gritty journey to the dark side of humanity. Unravel a deep and emotional story of survival, written by a Writers Guild Award winner.
Our Settings for Far Cry 3
Far Cry 3 is a game with a lot of odd performance issues, not all of which are related to what we are testing here today. In these two graphs above you can see there is no difference between what is being reported by FRAPS and what is being reported by our Frame Rating system, which indicates there aren't any runts or dropped frames to be found.
But, there IS a lot of jitter and variant frame times as you can clearly see from this scatter plot. Even the single GPU GTX Titan card with its 6GB of frame buffer isn't protected from the effects that Far Cry 3 has on gaming PCs. however, the HD 7990 / HD 7970 Crossfire setup is worse though, even at 1920×1080.
Of all of our minimum FPS graphics we have seen, Far Cry 3 is the most univerally slanted, meaning we are seeing the most native frame rate variance on all cards. All three solutions average around 40-42 FPS across the entire 60 second capture though the HD 7970s drop off at around the 85th percentile.
Accordingly, the frame variance increases at a similar rate for the HD 7970s in CrossFire.
Again we see dramatic changes going from the reported frame rates to the observed frame rates from our new system.
The plot of frame times has changed a bit though – in this case the GeForce GTX Titan is actually starting to pull away from the GTX 690 and the HD 7970s in CrossFire with smoother and more consisten frame times.
You can see that even though the average frame rate of the Titan starts out the slowest of the three configurations (35 FPS or so), it ENDS as the fastest with frame rates rarely if ever dropping below 30 FPS. The GTX 690 goes down towards 25 FPS and the HD 7990 / HD 7970s drop below 20.
This effect shows again here in our frame time variance graph where the GTX Titan is clearly the most consistent performer, even if it isn't always the fastest. Both the GTX 690 and the HD 7970s have much more difficulty.
With Eyefinity at work for the HD 7970s in CrossFire, we do see more problems with average frame rates – there are a TON of dropped frames in our recording, that when removed, bring the observed frame rate way down.
These are the individual plots for the 5760×1080 runs with each card configuration to demonstrate how the data above is gathered.
The plot of frame times shows an incredibly chaotic result – the dropped frames and spikes in times on the HD 7970s in CrossFire cause a lot of background noise, but even the GTX 690 with its smaller frame buffer struggles to keep up at these settings. Only the GTX Titan is able to maintain Ultra quality settings while also producing and incredibly consistent frame rate.
Performance is great for any cards, with the Titan only pushing 22 FPS on average or so, but the line indicating minimum frame rates over percentiles is much straighter with no sharp drops indicating other frame time issues.
Finally, the variance information tells the story again – the GTX Titan is steady and turns out to be the bigger winner at 5760×1080 multi-monitor gaming. Both the GTX 690 and the HD 7970s in CrossFire do poorly, with the HD 7990 we emulated taking a big jump up variance times around the 90th percentile.
Ryan,
Don’t worry about the
Ryan,
Don’t worry about the negative and bias comments.
Thank you for this great review, it has opened my eyes to the cause of these problems. And hopefully a new way to review all Graphics cards in future, instead of just looking at the highest FPS numbers.
I have always thought smooth experience is better than a fast (high FPS) and choppy visual gameplay.
Hopefully AMD and Nvidia will consider these issues in there next GPU and or driver releases now it has been exposed, rather than targeting figures. This means a better gameplay experience for the consumer.
Thank you and Keep up the good work.
Ryan,
Don’t worry about the
Ryan,
Don’t worry about the negative and bias comments.
Thank you for this great review, it has opened my eyes to the cause of these problems. And hopefully a new way to review all Graphics cards in future, instead of just looking at the highest FPS numbers.
I have always thought smooth experience is better than a fast (high FPS) and choppy visual gameplay.
Hopefully AMD and Nvidia will consider these issues in there next GPU and or driver releases now it has been exposed, rather than targeting figures. This means a better gameplay experience for the consumer.
Thank you and Keep up the good work.
I think that instead of the
I think that instead of the percentile curve you could reach a more meaningful result using a derived curve(of the frametime curve).
Let’s say that the average is 60 fps.
Now let’s say that 20 percent of the frames are 25 ms(40fps).
The difference is how these 25 ms values are spread in the curve. If they are all together or if they are alternated to 17 ms ones, forming saw-like shape in the curve.
You will not have the same feeling stutter-wise
What i want to say is that the percentile graph is not appropriate for the kind of analysis that you are doing. You should use a derived curve since deriving a function measures how quickly a curve grows (negatively or positively) and this is not measured by the percentile grows. After this you could measure the area of this curve and you could also arrive to use one only number to measure the amount of stutter.Infact in this way you would bring out of the equation the part of the frametime curve that is below the average but that runs steadily.
Calculating the area of a very saw-like derived frametime curve you would obtain a high number whereas calculating the area of a smooth (even if variating) derived frametime curve you would get a very low number. This would tell you how smooth are transitions, not if the gpu is powerful enough to make the game playable. For this you should check the average fps.
So in the end if you got decent fps and very low value for the area of this function you got a great experience,
if oyu got decent fps but high derived func area value then you got stutterish experience.
If you got low fps and low value you got a underdimensioned gpu but good smoothness.
I think that instead of the
I think that instead of the percentile curve you could reach a more meaningful result using a derived curve(of the frametime curve).
Let’s say that the average is 60 fps.
Now let’s say that 20 percent of the frames are 25 ms(40fps).
The difference is how these 25 ms values are spread in the curve. If they are all together or if they are alternated to 17 ms ones, forming saw-like shape in the curve.
You will not have the same feeling stutter-wise (and here i am not saying anything new)
What i want to say is that the percentile graph is not appropriate for the kind of analysis that you are doing. You should use a derived curve since deriving a function measures how quickly a curve grows (negatively or positively) and this is not measured by the percentile curve. After this you could measure the area of this curve and you could also arrive to use one only number to measure the amount of stutter.Infact in this way you would bring out of the equation the part of the frametime curve that is below the average but that runs steadily(something that with percentile curve you cant do).
Calculating the area of the derivation of a very saw-like frametime curve you would obtain a high number whereas calculating the area of the derivation ofa smooth (even if variating) frametime curve you would get a very low number. This would tell you how smooth are transitions, not if the gpu is powerful enough to make the game playable. For this you should check the average fps.
So in the end if you got decent fps and very low value for the area of this function you got a great experience,
if oyu got decent fps but high derived func area value then you got stutterish experience.
If you got low fps and low value you got a underdimensioned gpu but good smoothness.
EDITED :I made some corrections to the post i previously wrote since it is not possible to edit it
Quick Google “geforce frame
Quick Google “geforce frame metering” and you will find out why the nVi cards rarely have runt frames. In fact, nVi cards DO have them. They just delays those frames a bit to match with other good frames’ speed, therefore the frame time chart looks good miraculously.
That’s nVidia, it’s meant to SELL, at crazy pricetags of course.