Testing Methodology

As usual, we tested each carte du jour with Fraps to record its boilerplate frame charge per unit in seconds over a set amount of time. Nosotros typically run tests for 60 seconds. Reporting the boilerplate frames per second is how things have been done for... well, forever. It'south a fantastic metric in the sense that it's easy to record and easy to empathise just it doesn't tell the whole story, as The Tech Written report and others have shown.

To go a fuller picture, it's increasingly apparent that you need to factor in a carte'southward frame latency, which looks at how quickly each frame is delivered. Regardless of how many frames a graphics carte du jour produces on average in 60 seconds, if it tin't deliver them all at roughly the same speed, you might see more brief jittery points with one GPU over another -- something we've witnessed just didn't fully understand.

Assuming two cards deliver equal average frame rates, the 1 with lowest stable frame latency is going to offer the smoothest picture, and that'south a pretty important item to consider if yous're about to drop a wad of cash. As such, we'll be including this information from now on by measuring how long in milliseconds it takes cards to render each frame individually and then graphing that in a digestible way.

We'll be using the latency-focused 99th percentile metric, which looks at 99% of results recorded within X milliseconds, and the lower that number is, the faster and smoother the performance is overall. Past removing one% of the most extreme results, it'southward possible to filter anomalies that might take been caused by other components. Kudos to The Tech Report and other sites like PC Per for shining a light on this issue.

Test Organization Specs

  • Intel Cadre i7-4770K (iii.50GHz)
  • x2 4GB Crucial DDR3-2400 (CAS 11-13-13-28)
  • Asrock Z87 Extreme9/ac (Intel Z87)
  • OCZ ZX Series (1250W)
  • Crucial m4 512GB (SATA 6Gb/southward)
  • AMD Radeon HD 295X2 (8192MB)
  • Gigabyte Radeon Hd 290X (4096MB)
  • Gigabyte Radeon Hard disk drive 290 (4096MB)
  • HIS Radeon Hard disk drive 7990 (6144MB)
  • HIS Radeon HD 7970 GHz (3072MB) Crossfire
  • HIS Radeon Hd 280X (3072MB)
  • HIS Radeon HD 7970 GHz (3072MB)
  • HIS Radeon HD 7970 (3072MB)
  • Gigabyte GeForce GTX Titan (6144MB)
  • Palit GeForce GTX 780 Ti JetStream (3072MB)
  • Gigabyte GeForce GTX 780 Ti (3072MB)
  • Gainward GeForce GTX 780 (3072MB)
  • Gainward GeForce GTX 770 (2048MB)
  • Gainward GeForce GTX 690 (4096MB)
  • Gainward GeForce GTX 680 (2048MB)
  • Microsoft Windows eight.1 Pro 64-scrap
  • Nvidia GeForce 335.23
  • AMD Goad 14.3 Beta