To get a fuller picture, it’s increasingly apparent that you need to factor in a card’s frame latency, which looks at how quickly each frame is delivered. Regardless of how many frames a graphics card produces on average in 60 seconds, if it can’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 but didn’t fully understand.
Assuming two cards deliver equal average frame rates, the one with lowest stable frame latency is going to offer the smoothest picture, and that’s a pretty important detail to consider if you’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. By removing 1% of the most extreme results, it’s possible to filter anomalies that might have been caused by other components. Again, kudos to The Tech Report and other sites like PC Per for shining a light on this issue.
Test System Specs
Intel Core i7-4770K (3.50GHz) 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/s) Gigabyte Radeon HD 290X OC (4096MB) HIS Radeon HD 290X (4096MB) Gigabyte Radeon HD 290 OC (4096MB) HIS Radeon HD 290 (4096MB) HIS Radeon HD 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 8.1 Pro 64-bit Nvidia GeForce 331.93 AMD Catalyst 13.12
