FCAT Frametime Recording GeForce GTX 980 2-way SLI
Frametime and latency performance
With a benchmark technology called FCAT on the following two pages, we will look into Frame Experience Analysis. Basically with the charts shown we are trying to show you graphics anomalies like stutters and glitches in a plotted chart. Lately there has been a new measurement introduced, latency measurements. Basically it is the opposite of FPS.
- FPS mostly measures performance, the number of frames rendered per passing second.
- Frametime AKA Frame Experience recordings mostly measures and exposes anomalies - here we look at how long it takes to render one frame. Measure that chronologically and you can see anomalies like peaks and dips in a plotted chart, indicating something could be off.
| Frame time in milliseconds |
FPS |
| 8.3 | 120 |
| 15 | 66 |
| 20 | 50 |
| 25 | 40 |
| 30 | 33 |
| 50 | 20 |
| 70 | 14 |
We have a detailed article (read here) on the new FCAT methodology used, and it also explains why we do not use FRAPS anymore. Frametime - Basically the time it takes to render one frame can be monitored and tagged with a number, this is latency. One frame can take say 17 ms. Higher latency can indicate a slow framerate, and weird latency spikes indicate a stutter, jitter, twitches; basically anomalies that are visible on your monitor.
What Do These Measurements Show?
Basically, what these measurements show are anomalies like small glitches and stutters that you can sometimes (and please do read that well, sometimes) see on screen. Below I'd like to run through a couple of titles with you. Bear in mind that Average FPS matters more than frametime measurements.
Frame Pacing / Frametime - Single GPU
Above the frame-time results of the test run @ 2560x1440 performed with a single GeForce GTX 980 and GeForce GTX 980 SLI (2-way). As you can see SLI scales really good. At the 50 percentile we see almost 110 FPS, which can be considered your average framerate.
Note: we obviously tried to include Crossfire results as well - unfortunately the R9 295x2 crashes in Crossfire, and two Fiji card (Fury X in Crossfire) completely mess up, one second it's like 100 FPS and the other is drop to 60 FPS. AMD will need a driver update for this title to properly support multi-GPU.
Frame-time and thus latency then - This test run lasts roughly 30 seconds. Overall this is REALLY smooth. No weirdness in SLI at all.
