I"m not seeing how this is fully beneficial to high end multi-gpu AMD users other than proof of concept. Anyone who is likely to blow a wad on a 7990 is not using them at 1920x1080 or 2560xwhatever. That is a waste of resolution to a 7990 and micro stuttering is not likely to be that apparent since so many extra frames are being rendered already.

So, in all comments for this topic no one bothered to notice that every single test made here has periodical badly AMD badly optimized GPU driver doing extremely bad job by frame drops ? (and no I wouldn't blame any other hardware. I am pretty damn sure this site owner testing had stable enough equipment over testing to overcome any issues based on rest of the technology.) So, those drops you see in pictures of framerates are same exact calculation issue AMD has had in every single card they build with crappy drivers since 2010. (if you have any doubt what I am saying not to be true. You can pick up "identical"-type amd and nvidia cards I promise nvidia card will not do those drops and just for the record I hate nvidia.) Just had to type that out even while I did read the article really really late.

So, in all comments for this topic no one bothered to notice that every single test made here has periodical badly AMD badly optimized GPU driver doing extremely bad job by frame drops ? (and no I wouldn't blame any other hardware. I am pretty damn sure this site owner testing had stable enough equipment over testing to overcome any issues based on rest of the technology.) So, those drops you see in pictures of framerates are same exact calculation issue AMD has had in every single card they build with crappy drivers since 2010. (if you have any doubt what I am saying not to be true. You can pick up "identical"-type amd and nvidia cards I promise nvidia card will not do those drops and just for the record I hate nvidia.) Just had to type that out even while I did read the article really really late.

I, personally, did not understand anything from your reply. Elaborate please?

That is a waste of resolution to a 7990 and micro stuttering is not likely to be that apparent since so many extra frames are being rendered already.

I agree that a 7990 is a bit of a waste at 1920*1080, but to say there isn't any "apparent" micro-stuttering is a completely ignorant statement, which tells me that you don't have a crossfire setup; and thus have no relevant input as to what micro-stuttering might even look like. I have 2x5870's and the visible MSing is horribly obvious at 1080p. With the newly released 13.8 Catalyst driver update MS has almost totally disappeared.

I, personally, did not understand anything from your reply. Elaborate please?

He's saying that in almost every test you can still notice dropped frames.

I always find it amusing how ppl just 'allow' their hardware to slough off and not do what its supposed to out of the box...how is a class action suit never get launched against companies when this sorts of things happen...?

I, personally, did not understand anything from your reply. Elaborate please?

He's saying that every benchmark run in every review here so far(and around the world ofc) since the time period he's refferring was run with badly optimized drivers. And since the benches were run with badly optimized drivers, they had frame drops. Now tbh I don't know by how much, if at all, the average/min/max FPS or the scores of the benchmarks were affected. And if the comparison that I saw, sometimes the performance with the frame pacing driver(13.8) was even slower than the badly optimized drivers. Smoother but slower(less FPS).

I always find it amusing how ppl just 'allow' their hardware to slough off and not do what its supposed to out of the box...how is a class action suit never get launched against companies when this sorts of things happen...?

+1 Yeah, like buying an expensive toaster that sometimes it makes toasts and sometimes it doesnt. Or even sometimes it half-toasts.. 😀

He's saying that in almost every test you can still notice dropped frames.

It have been allready mentionned, thoses are not frames dropped. its a buffer retained frames who appear in fcat.. This have been push to attention of reviewers a long time ago. hardware canuck:

In one of the emails sent by AMD to reviewers earlier this week, they raised a red flag about the FCAT logging problems. I think that's what Ryan was talking about rather than claiming it was a surprise to him and something that was just discovered. As a matter of fact, Sushiwarrior deserves some credit here too since he raised holy hell about this problem on some forums and was discrete about exposing the exact problems. A well-timed PM from him actually saved me days of trouble-shooting. A good way to tell who implemented the fix is easy: look at how many dropped frames are in an FCAT logging chart and, more importantly, check out the runt / dropped frames charts. The new Frame Pacing driver nearly eliminates dropped frames since the software is actively regulating frame delivery rather than throwing out frames in an effort to balance things out. If the issue is still present, there will be a ton of dropped frames in those charts. Personally, I don't use NVIDIA chart creation program since i don't agree with how it extenuates dropped and runted frames. I have always wanted those charts to show what the on-screen experience really is. Since runts and dropped frames have no impact whatsoever on gameplay fluidity, I use a .csv export which automatically removes them. On the other hand, since they influence overall framerate performance, they're included in the framerate over time chart.

hardOCP:

"You might have come across scenarios while testing this driver, where FCAT reports 15 dropped frames, in some applications, fairly consistently. These are not dropped frames. The way FCAT works with frames and color bars, is whenever its 16 color bar sequence is interrupted, it interprets that as dropped frames . We’re working on resolving a glitch in our driver that is causing FCAT to incorrectly report dropped frames."

Anandtech, have a long explanation i will not quote here ( too long ). .................................... @Kinniaki, it dont affect performance on min, average and max, for a simple reason, when you have a frame drop it is immediately followed by a peak: at best it negate the drop, at worst it drop the fps reported by a good amount.