Skyrim
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (DirectX 9)
The Empire of Tamriel is on the edge. The High King of Skyrim has been murdered.
Alliances form as claims to the throne are made. In the midst of this conflict, a far more dangerous, ancient evil is awakened. Dragons, long lost to the passages of the Elder Scrolls, have returned to Tamriel.
The future of Skyrim, even the Empire itself, hangs in the balance as they wait for the prophesized Dragonborn to come; a hero born with the power of The Voice, and the only one who can stand amongst the dragons.
Our settings for Skyrim
Here is a video our testing run through, for your reference
Skyrim is another game in our series of tests do not show performance degradation due to runts or dropped frames. However, it's obvious that the HD 7970s in CrossFire are not scaling as you would expect them to either. Bot the Titan and the GTX 690 are outpacing it by a healthy margin.
What we do see in Skyrim is nice, tight bands of frame times with the exception of the occassional stutter or spike; but those are occuring not only AMD's HD 7970 CrossFire configuraiton, but also with the GTX 690 and even the single GPU GTX Titan.
The graph of minimum FPS looks different in Skyrim than in any other game, with a nearly constant slant slope from left to right. The two NVIDIA cards track pretty closely with an average of around 150 FPS while the HD 7970s in CrossFire start at an average of 115 FPS and fall down from there.
Even though all three cards have some bigger spikes and hitches in frame times, none of them exhibit a lot of frame time variance and all remain within a very tight window at 1920×1080.
Again, at 2560×1440, nothing changes from the FRAPS frame rates to the frame rate averages reocrded by our new Frame Rating system. However, CrossFire still doesn't look very impressive.
Frame times also remain consistent at this resolution with the same kind of spiking and hitching dilemma we found above. All three configuraitons exhibit very similiar levels of frame time variance even though the HD 7970s are obviously slower overall with higher frame times.
Looking at average frame rates (estimated by the 50th percentile here) you'll find the GTX 690 as the initial winner with close to a 20 FPS edge of the GTX Titan and both NVIDIA options leaving the HD 7970s in CrossFire well behind. However, at 80-85th percentile mark you'll find that the GTX Titan actually creeps ahead indicating slightly better frame rates on the edges of performance.
Even though frame rates vary on all three cards, the frame times are consistent across the board, indicating a good experience in all three cases.
Without the results to emulate the HD 7990 with HD 7970s in CrossFire, the NVIDIA GTX 690 and GTX Titan results are showing a slight edge to the dual-GK104 part early in the benchmark with a much closer result in the latter half.
While we have seen spikes in frame times caused by the Skyrim engine at 19×10 and 25×14, they are much more apparant with the GTX 690 here at 5760×1080 than they are on the GTX Titan. Because of that, the Titan is definitely looking like the better multi-display gaming option.
Interestingly, even with the additional spikes we saw with the GTX 690 above, the minimum FPS graph is showing the GTX Titan BARELY behind the entire latter 50% of our results which would tell one story, but…
Frame time variance tells another. Even though the frame rates are lower on average for the GTX 690, the truth is that the GTX Titan produces a better, more consistent and smooth frame rate over time than the dual-GPU option can.
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.