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.

Frame Rating: GeForce GTX Titan, GeForce GTX 690, Radeon HD 7990 (HD 7970 CrossFire) - Graphics Cards 21

Frame Rating: GeForce GTX Titan, GeForce GTX 690, Radeon HD 7990 (HD 7970 CrossFire) - Graphics Cards 22

Frame Rating: GeForce GTX Titan, GeForce GTX 690, Radeon HD 7990 (HD 7970 CrossFire) - Graphics Cards 23

Frame Rating: GeForce GTX Titan, GeForce GTX 690, Radeon HD 7990 (HD 7970 CrossFire) - Graphics Cards 24

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.

 

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