Test Setup
Testing Configuration
The specifications for our testing system haven't changed much.
| Test System Setup | |
| CPU | Intel Core i7-3960X Sandy Bridge-E |
| Motherboard | ASUS P9X79 Deluxe |
| Memory | Corsair Dominator DDR3-1600 16GB |
| Hard Drive | OCZ Agility 4 256GB SSD |
| Sound Card | On-board |
| Graphics Card | MSI Radeon R9 280 Gaming 2GB AMD Radeon R9 280X 2GB AMD Radeon R9 270X 2GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 2GB |
| Graphics Drivers | AMD: 14.6 Beta NVIDIA: 337.50 |
| Power Supply | Corsair AX1200i |
| Operating System | Windows 8.1 Pro x64 |
What you should be watching for
- MSI R9 280 vs R9 280X – How does the slightly overclocked R9 280 from MSI compare to a reference speed R9 280X that costs $60 more?
- MSI R9 280 vs R9 270X – Does the R9 280 offer a significant enough performance upgrade for the added $40?
- MSI R9 280 vs GTX 760 – How do these equal priced competitors stack up?
If you don't need the example graphs and explanations below, you can jump straight to the benchmark results now!!
Frame Rating: Our Testing Process
If you aren't familiar with it, you should probably do a little research into our testing methodology as it is quite different than others you may see online. Rather than using FRAPS to measure frame rates or frame times, we are using an secondary PC to capture the output from the tested graphics card directly and then use post processing on the resulting video to determine frame rates, frame times, frame variance and much more.
This amount of data can be pretty confusing if you attempting to read it without proper background, but I strongly believe that the results we present paint a much more thorough picture of performance than other options. So please, read up on the full discussion about our Frame Rating methods before moving forward!!
While there are literally dozens of file created for each “run” of benchmarks, there are several resulting graphs that FCAT produces, as well as several more that we are generating with additional code of our own.
If you don't need the example graphs and explanations below, you can jump straight to the benchmark results now!!
The PCPER FRAPS File
While the graphs above are produced by the default version of the scripts from NVIDIA, I have modified and added to them in a few ways to produce additional data for our readers. The first file shows a sub-set of the data from the RUN file above, the average frame rate over time as defined by FRAPS, though we are combining all of the GPUs we are comparing into a single graph. This will basically emulate the data we have been showing you for the past several years.
The PCPER Observed FPS File
This graph takes a different subset of data points and plots them similarly to the FRAPS file above, but this time we are look at the “observed” average frame rates, shown previously as the blue bars in the RUN file above. This takes out the dropped and runts frames, giving you the performance metrics that actually matter – how many frames are being shown to the gamer to improve the animation sequences.
As you’ll see in our full results on the coming pages, seeing a big difference between the FRAPS FPS graphic and the Observed FPS will indicate cases where it is likely the gamer is not getting the full benefit of the hardware investment in their PC.
The PLOT File
The primary file that is generated from the extracted data is a plot of calculated frame times including runts. The numbers here represent the amount of time that frames appear on the screen for the user, a “thinner” line across the time span represents frame times that are consistent and thus should produce the smoothest animation to the gamer. A “wider” line or one with a lot of peaks and valleys indicates a lot more variance and is likely caused by a lot of runts being displayed.
The RUN File
While the two graphs above show combined results for a set of cards being compared, the RUN file will show you the results from a single card on that particular result. It is in this graph that you can see interesting data about runts, drops, average frame rate and the actual frame rate of your gaming experience.
For tests that show no runts or drops, the data is pretty clean. This is the standard frame rate per second over a span of time graph that has become the standard for performance evaluation on graphics cards.
A test that does have runts and drops will look much different. The black bar labeled FRAPS indicates the average frame rate over time that traditional testing would show if you counted the drops and runts in the equation – as FRAPS FPS measurement does. Any area in red is a dropped frame – the wider the amount of red you see, the more colored bars from our overlay were missing in the captured video file, indicating the gamer never saw those frames in any form.
The wide yellow area is the representation of runts, the thin bands of color in our captured video, that we have determined do not add to the animation of the image on the screen. The larger the area of yellow the more often those runts are appearing.
Finally, the blue line is the measured FPS over each second after removing the runts and drops. We are going to be calling this metric the “observed frame rate” as it measures the actual speed of the animation that the gamer experiences.
The PERcentile File
Scott introduced the idea of frame time percentiles months ago but now that we have some different data using direct capture as opposed to FRAPS, the results might be even more telling. In this case, FCAT is showing percentiles not by frame time but instead by instantaneous FPS. This will tell you the minimum frame rate that will appear on the screen at any given percent of time during our benchmark run. The 50th percentile should be very close to the average total frame rate of the benchmark but as we creep closer to the 100% we see how the frame rate will be affected.
The closer this line is to being perfectly flat the better as that would mean we are running at a constant frame rate the entire time. A steep decline on the right hand side tells us that frame times are varying more and more frequently and might indicate potential stutter in the animation.
The PCPER Frame Time Variance File
Of all the data we are presenting, this is probably the one that needs the most discussion. In an attempt to create a new metric for gaming and graphics performance, I wanted to try to find a way to define stutter based on the data sets we had collected. As I mentioned earlier, we can define a single stutter as a variance level between t_game and t_display. This variance can be introduced in t_game, t_display, or on both levels. Since we can currently only reliably test the t_display rate, how can we create a definition of stutter that makes sense and that can be applied across multiple games and platforms?
We define a single frame variance as the difference between the current frame time and the previous frame time – how consistent the two frames presented to the gamer. However, as I found in my testing plotting the value of this frame variance is nearly a perfect match to the data presented by the minimum FPS (PER) file created by FCAT. To be more specific, stutter is only perceived when there is a break from the previous animation frame rates.
Our current running theory for a stutter evaluation is this: find the current frame time variance by comparing the current frame time to the running average of the frame times of the previous 20 frames. Then, by sorting these frame times and plotting them in a percentile form we can get an interesting look at potential stutter. Comparing the frame times to a running average rather than just to the previous frame should prevent potential problems from legitimate performance peaks or valleys found when moving from a highly compute intensive scene to a lower one.
While we are still trying to figure out if this is the best way to visualize stutter in a game, we have seen enough evidence in our game play testing and by comparing the above graphic to other data generated through our Frame rating system to be reasonably confident in our assertions. So much in fact that I am going to going this data the PCPER ISU, which beer fans will appreciate the acronym of International Stutter Units.
To compare these results you want to see a line that is as close the 0ms mark as possible indicating very little frame rate variance when compared to a running average of previous frames. There will be some inevitable incline as we reach the 90+ percentile but that is expected with any game play sequence that varies from scene to scene. What we do not want to see is a sharper line up that would indicate higher frame variance (ISU) and could be an indication that the game sees microstuttering and hitching problems.
No overvolting or memory
No overvolting or memory overclocking? The card looks promising with Hynix memory and a good cooler.
$230 is great compared to its current competition, but it isn’t too impressive considering that 7950s dropped to ~$200 quite a while ago, before the Bitcoin inflation.
In the video you say that the
In the video you say that the card has 2GB of VRAM when it actually has three.
Was a story AMD a new tonga
Was a story AMD a new tonga named gpu to replace the r9 280 later this year.
Wonderful goods from you,
Wonderful goods from you, man. I’ve understand your stuff previous to and you’re just extremely magnificent.
I really like what you have acquired here,
certainly like what you’re stating and the way in which you say it.
You make it entertaining and you still care for
to keep it wise. I can not wait to read far more from you.
This is really a terrific website.
Take a look at my weblog – hair wigs (Keri)
I’m kind of disappointed.
I
I’m kind of disappointed.
I looked at the past five graphics card reviews and none of them had the memory overclocked. As much as I like you Ryan, I think that’s pretty ignorant of you to not even consider overclocking the memory.
I understand it doesn’t improve the performance as much as overclocking the core does, but it’s still free performance. You never know if a game has some sort of weird bottleneck that is alleviated after increasing memory frequency.
You should consider that in future reviews.
Much love, a hard critic.
Pretty sure I overclocked the
Pretty sure I overclocked the memory on my last review. I know on NV cards often overclocking the memory causes the core to not overclock as well. Some interesting push/pull situations with that…
Ah, you did the review, Josh?
Ah, you did the review, Josh? Said the author was Ryan.
At any rate, Overclocking the memory to it’s limit typically does reduce maximum core overclocking, but not by a significant margin. There’s always a balance to be had between the two. I guess you just didn’t have the time to find that balance. Kudos anyway.
To the last post, I would
To the last post, I would think that you would want to test the card as it was sold. It would be like ordering a card from a retailer and then being upset because it did not overclock well. It is either good for your needs as is or it is not as the manufacture sold it.
As an enthusiast, I’d like to
As an enthusiast, I’d like to overclock things to their limit. It wouldn’t have mattered if the memory didn’t overclock at all. What bothered me was that there was no attempt to find that limit.
I had a pair of 7950s (XFX DDs) which is the same as R9 280 with similar clocks. Memory was set to 5 GHz out of the box. I managed to push them to 6.8 GHz, resulting in significant performance gains. Would have been nice to know what this card would have reached given that different manufacturers use different DRAM.
Another oddball was a reference GTX 760 from EVGA. Core overclocking was abysmal as I managed only 1150 MHz with 1.21V, but the memory went all the way to 7800 MHz from a stock 6000 Mhz simply because they used Samsung memory (Same as the stock memory on GTX 770) as oppose to Hynix which pretty much all other vendors used on their 760s.
when i’m building my new pc i
when i’m building my new pc i wonder how am i going to start installing the OS ,when the motherboard doesn’t have integrated graphics ……..how should the display be able to show images if drivers of the gpu arent installed and there is not integrated graphics on motherboard and how i am going to install the drivers……??
And i have the same question for the other parts like the cpu,cd-room,,,,,,,in a new build pc do this parts start working automatically or what??
It’s a bit late to answer,
It’s a bit late to answer, but I’ll go ahead anyway. First almost all motherboards have integrated graphics now. But even if it doesn’t you would just plug the graphics card into it and it will work. The display might be stuck at 1074×765 or something like that, and look funky and run sluggish till the proper drivers are installed, but it will work. And everything else like the cd-rom will just work too, assuming there’s nothing physically/mechanically wrong and it’s plugged into the motherboard correctly.
I remember before my first build everything seemed a bit intimidating, but it’s really a simple endeavor. Just plug everything in and install the drivers, easy peasy.