Inside the second: A new look at game benchmarking

Leave it up to the guys at TechReport to come up with a reason for changing how we run 3D benchmarks.  There are pleny of good quotes in this article and after an hour you'll wonder why you're still reading but, it's that good.

Naturally, we contacted the major graphics chip vendors to see what they had to say about the issue. Somewhat to our surprise, representatives from both AMD and Nvidia quickly and forthrightly acknowledged that multi-GPU micro-stuttering is a real problem, is what we measured in our frame-time analysis, and is difficult to address. Both companies said they've been studying this problem for some time, too. That's intriguing, because neither firm saw fit to inform potential customers about the issue when introducing its most recent multi-GPU product, say the Radeon HD 6990 or the GeForce GTX 590. Hmm.

AMD's David Nalasco identified micro-stuttering as an issue with the rate at which frames are dispatched to GPUs, and he said the problem is not always an easy one to reproduce. Nalasco noted that jitter can come and go as one plays a game, because the relative timings between frames can vary.

I also noticed an interesting coincidence given their hint of coming up with a "Jitter Index".  (bottom of page 6).  Of course their "index" would correspond to the Ninjalane Multi GPU Index number system as a way to rate the micro-stuttering that happens when you link more than one video card together.

Related Web URL: http://techreport.com/articles.x/21516