jmke

I suppose it all started with a brief conversation. Last fall, I was having dinner with Ramsom Koay, the PR rep from Thermaltake. He's an inquisitive guy, and he wanted to know the answer to what seemed like a simple question: why does anyone need a faster video card, so long as a relatively cheap one will produce 30 frames per second? And what's the deal with more FPS, anyway? Who needs it?

I'm ostensibly the expert in such things, but honestly, I wasn't prepared for such a question right at that moment. Caught off guard, I took a second to think it through and gave my best answer. I think it was a good one, as these things go, with some talk about avoiding slowdowns and maintaining a consistent illusion of motion. But I realized something jarring as I was giving it—that the results we provide our readers in our video card reviews don't really address the issues I'd just identified very well.

That thought stuck with me and began, slowly, to grow. I was too busy to do much about it as the review season cranked up, but I did make one simple adjustment to my testing procedures: ticking the checkbox in Fraps—the utility we use to record in-game frame rates—that tells it to log individual frame times to disk. In every video card review that followed, I quietly collected data on how long each frame took to render.

Finally, last week, at the end of a quiet summer, I was able to take some time to slice and dice all of the data I'd collected. What the data showed proved to be really quite enlightening—and perhaps a bit scary, since it threatens to upend some of our conclusions in past reviews. Still, I think the results are very much worth sharing. In fact, they may change the way you think about video game benchmarking.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/21516

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