Microstuttering with ATI Radeon HD 5970 Tested In 5 Games

@ 2010/01/14
Microstuttering is a giant multi-GPU problem and is why I had felt the games were smoother when I went "down" from a SLI rig to a single 4870 a year ago, even though the FPS of my SLI rig was faster. Unfortunately this big, big issue gets often overlooked. It's completely unrealistic to compare AFR frame rates with normal frame rates. In the graphs the X axis is the frame rendered and the Y axis is the amount of time in milliseconds that it took to render the frame at that exact time.




Here you can see that FPS varies wildly between 40 and 75. Most probably, in these instances FRAPS showed FPS around 62, whereas it was 40 fps-smooth at that time. This is why you can't trust AFR's FPS.


BOTTOM LINE: Never compare dual GPU FPS to single gpu FPS. Back when I had a G92 SLI system I had concluded that the second GPU, while multiplying FPS by about 1.5-1.6, didn't contribute anything to the smoothness.

(more results @ the source)

Comment from jmke @ 2010/01/20
here's a nice tool to test microstuttering on your multiGPU system: http://www.computerbase.de/downloads...er_single-gpu/
Comment from jmke @ 2010/01/14
Comment from jmke @ 2010/01/14
The ideal chart would look almost something like this:



a completely horizontal line without any variations is perfection and no more microstuttering.