Frame Pacing Enhancements

Frame Pacing Enhancements

Frame-pacing enhancements have been implemented in prior AMD Catalyst drivers to bring a smoother gameplay experience to users of AMD Crossfire Multi-GPU graphics configurations. The AMD Catalyst Omega driver brings this same technology to AMD Dual Graphics system configurations, which harness the power of an AMD APU working together with an AMD Radeon GPU. Basically what AMD claims with the new release is that the actual frametime average in-between frames has gotten better. Meaning the discrepancies or even better, the deviation  in-between frames (responsible for the big phat results you have seen in the past) is smaller.

We can easily have a look at that by using FCAT and and simply comparing the drivers with a Crossfire setup. We'll use the Radeon R9 295x2 for this. Have a peek:

Above a 28 seconds frametime recording of the BioShock infinite benchmark @ 2560x1440. So the light green line was the launch driver (14.4), the dark green line is the Omega 14.12 driver. I threw in a R7 265 for scaling. It is very hard to see, but you will notice that the dark green line (14.12 driver) overall is closer to each other, the deviation in-between frames is smaller, we concur. But even with the old 14.4 driver, the result here is terrific.

Let's do one more.

It is a little tough to see with the green 14.4 driver taking the top layer, but the dark green line is a little closer to each other. A small difference on this title though. At an average of 13ms per frame you are looking at excellent frame-rates without micro-stuttering or serious enough anomalies.

Tomb Raider again at 2560x1440 rendered so darn fast that it really is hard to spot a difference whatsoever. You could however state that you see more light green then dark green, and thus the 14.4 driver is deviating more. Bit at this latency, the difference is irrelevant really. On average the frame-pacing deviation has decreased, we concur.