Frame Rating: High End GPUs Benchmarked at 4K Resolutions

Far Cry 3 (DirectX 11)

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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

Now that we are up to the $999 cards we are seeing some more impressive performance.  The HD 7990 with the prototype driver is definitely looking the best, though the observed frame rates are lower than the FRAPS frame rates.  The gap is nothing compared to the HD 7990 with the 13.5 beta driver though.

Wow…that is…ugly.  The GTX Titan is the only card that has a reasonable frame time graph; it is very tight, especially in comparison to the other cards in our sets.  The blue line of the GTX 690 is better than either HD 7990 option but the prototype driver sees a big improvement over the currently 13.5 beta.

Even though the average frame rate (50th percentile) of the HD 7990 with the prototype driver is higher than the GTX 690, the frame rate quickly drops down the curve, going below the GTX 690 at the 55th percentile and below the GTX Titan at the 70th. 

The frame time variance shows the problems with multi-GPU options in Far Cry 3, especially at 4K resolutions.  The GTX Titan stays very low while the GTX 690 is adding 20 ms of frame variance for about 10% of the frames rendered.  The HD 7990 with the current driver is adding 20 ms for 75% of frames though!  With the updated prototype driver we see that decrease to 28% of frames.  Obviously the GTX 690 is the best multi-GPU card for Far Cry 3 at this quality level.

 

Our Titans appear to be scaling pretty well with two and three cards – with the exception of the nasty spike down at the end of the test run, seen in both 2-Way and 3-Way result. 

The frame times still show some scaling problems with SLI as we can tell the graphs are not nearly as tight and clean with two or three cards as they are with a single.  Interestingly though, the 3-Way result is a bit LESS variant than 2-Way!

Frame rates scale from 20 FPS to 38 FPS and to 52 FPS as we add in more GTX Titan cards, an impressive scaling rate of 1.9x and 2.6x.

Frame time variance is relatively low for the GTX Titan as we add more GPUs, indicating that the 6GB frame buffer is making a big difference for the GK110 architecture.  Also interesting to see is that the 3-Way configuration is indeed less variant than the 2-Way SLI result.