Built a new PC and jumped into Ryzen ship

It's been a very long time since I've posted something, so here goes.

In December 2018, I built a new PC because I just wanted to. The old one wasn't terribly slow or anything. Just wanted to have some fun.

This time I went with an AMD CPU. Last time I had an AMD chip was in 2006.

Not all parts were brand new though. The video card and the display were bought from Overclockers Australia trade forums second hand.

Specs

New parts

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 2700 3.2 GHz
• CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-D15S
• Motherboard: MSI B450 GAMING PRO CARBON AC
• Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3200 CMK16GX4M2Z3200C16
• Storage: Samsung 970 Evo 500 GB SSD
• Case: Fractal Design Meshify C
• Power Supply: SeaSonic FOCUS Plus Gold 850 W

Second-hand parts

• Video Card: MSI GeForce GTX 1080 GAMING X 8G
• Monitor: Asus PG279Q ROG Swift 27.0" 2560x1440 165 Hz (I've added a second monitor since then)
• Case Fans: Fractal Design X2 GP-12 (x2)

Old parts

• Keyboard: Corsair K70 LUX
• Mouse: Logitech G602 Wireless (I've upgraded it since then along with the mousepad)
• Headphones: Audio-Technica ATH-AD500X
• Storage: Western Digital Green 4TB  x2

I have never won the silicon lottery and it's same this time too. The CPU barely goes past 4GHz without ludicrous volts. The GPU core also doesn't overclock that much. So are the memory. Not the happiest camper, but love the change.

[Rant] Finally AMD Mantle performance numbers in Battlefield 4 releases

Yesterday DICE, the developer of Battlefield 4 game, released a huge patch. The game had all sorts of stability issues for many months and the patch was supposed to address all of them. I’m sure those bug fixes are important to some people, but what I was interested in was one particular addition. AMD Mantle support. I think a lot of people were worried that DICE will delay the Mantle update until the bugs were sorted out. So it was a pleasant surprise for me.

But unfortunately, the Mantle update for the game alone didn’t suffice. AMD needed to release a driver with Mantle support as well. I didn’t know that the current driver didn’t have support for Mantle yet.

The thing is, AMD had a working beta driver, but there seemed to be a problem with the installer that they had to delay the release a bit. So far the review sites have received the driver and have tested the performance boost which Mantle gives. But the general public will hopefully receive the drive soon. AMD Catalyst 14.1 Beta is what you want to get. The support will be limited to the R9 290x, 290, 260x and Kaveri APUs initially. The support for the rest of the cards will arrive later on.

Mantle surely delivers a boost, but unfortunately, if you have a fast CPU, you won’t notice a big boost. What Mantle does is, it lowers the CPU overhead in the 3D rendering software pipeline. So, faster the CPU is, less of a problem that overhead will cause.

So, how much of a boost would you see with Mantle? For the actual numbers, check out Anandtech’s article here.

But what matters the most is the following graph issued by AMD.

It makes one wonder, if Mantle was created not to give AMD graphics cards an advantage over NVidia graphics cards, but to bring AMD CPUs to up to the same level as Intel CPUs in games. The issue with AMD CPUs is that their single threaded performance sucks compared to Intel’s. But when it comes to multi threaded performance, their FX 8000 series CPUs (8320, 8350 etc) are competitive with Intel’s quad core CPUs – even the ones that support Hyper Threading. Plus, since Mantle is going to become a standard eventually – not just limited to AMD graphics cards – it is aimed at AMD CPUs rather than AMD GPUs.

[Rant] AMD FreeSync?

Couple of months ago, NVidia came up with a new technology called G-Sync to solve a problem gamers had been encountering for decades. Stuttering. What they do is they tell the display to refresh once a new frame has been finished rendering by the GPU, instead of the display refreshing at a constant interval automatically. For this, they had to modify the internals of the display. They had to replace the scalar module with their own G-Sync module. DIY lovers will be able to buy the module separately and modify their own display, if that is supported. General public will have to buy a new display with G-Sync support built in. Since this module is expensive,a G-Sync supported display will carry a price premium of $100 or so.

Thus, there are two issues with G-Sync.

1. You need to buy a new display and that display is more expensive than a comparable display that doesn't support G-Sync
2. You need to have a NVidia graphics card as NVidia won't be licensing this technology to AMD or anyone else in the near future.

And comes AMD's solution. AMD is not actually doing much other than releasing a driver update. You won't need a separate hardware module in the display, because it seems the VESA standard already supports controlling VBLANK intervals. (VBLANK is a “name” from the old CRT days, but is still used in LCDs as well) VBLANK interval is the time that the display waits till until the next refresh cycle starts. The problem here is that none of the displays currently available does not support this. This is just an optional feature in the VESA standard. Thus you still need to buy a new display that supports this, but nobody knows when displays that support this feature would come out. But when the display come out, they won't carry the premium of the G-Sync like module. And if it really works out well, it will be just as good as G-Sync.

The good news is that the upcoming Display Port 1.3 specification requires to have it implemented, hence the day won’t be that far away. But then again, G-Sync won’t require you to get a display with a Display Port interface. The modified scalar board (yes, that’s the G-Sync board) will take care of it.

AMD showed a preview of Free Sync at CES 2014 using a laptop. This laptop supports controlling VBLANK intervals, but not for getting rid of stuttering, but to save power by lowering refresh rate when you don’t need it – like when you are watching 24fps movies in full-screen. AMD is simply exploiting that. Most laptops don’t have it implemented either. One reason why this is available in some of the laptops is because there is no need for a scalar board because you don’t get inputs from different interfaces like DVI, D-SUB, HDMI etc. The input interface is fixed and already decided, thus it doesn’t require many of the circuitry that a normal desktop display needs to handle multiple interfaces.

Click here to read more about FreeSync at PCPerspective.

Now, that makes me wonder if there is some hope for these Korean displays (which I own one already) which don’t have a scalar board inside. They seem to have a bypass board though, but I don’t know what that does.

[Rant] Oh noes...coin miners are going to ruin R9 290 purchase

Today when I woke up in the morning, I recieved this alarming message. The prices of AMD R9 graphics cards have gone up by $100. Even the R9 280x is now $399. The R9 290 is $499. I have no idea what the new price of the R9 290x is though, and I don't care even if it is $1000 because I'm not interested in it.

The reason for this price hike is the high demand and low supply Not from gamers though. From coin miners. BitCoin and LiteCoin are the most popular virtual currencies at the moment. The value of these viirtual currencies have gone up massively in the last year or so, hence  the interest towards them have multiplied. If you use the GPU instead of the CPU, you could process more work and increase the chances of finding these coins in an order of maginitude. But you would only see a benefit - or a tangible benefit - if you use an AMD graphics card because their general compute power is lightyears ahead of the current gen NVidia graphics cards. With the current Kepler architecture, NVidia crippled the compute capabilities of the consumer graphics cards and are now basically only good for gaming. Even the old Fermi cards are better than Kepler in compute.

This has caused a huge demand for AMD cards. Most of the buyers give a rat's ass about gaming. They want these cards just for mining. They can even have more than 4 graphics cards in a rig to do their mining work. You don't have to combine them as in a Crossfire configuration to make full use of them. So if you see a photo of rig with more than 4 AMD graphics cards, you don't necessarily have to think that it is photoshopped.

I, on the other hand give a rat's ass about coin mining. I want a graphics card for gaming. If you read my previous post, you would know that the only card I thought was good enough to replace my current NVidia GTX 670 was the AMD R9 290. At the time I was writing that post (i.e. yesterday), the card was $399 in the US and $470 in Japan. But now the card is $499 is the US, but it is still at $470 in Japan. There is no doubt that the prices in Japan would go up as well, but when? Should I panic and buy a reference card now? Or should I wait for the dust to settle down (i.e. for AMD to ramp up the production and bring down the price to the original MSRP)? I still don't want to get a reference card because of that piece of crap cooler on them.

What do you guys think I should do? Play the waiting game and get what really wante or grab non-ideal while I can get it for "cheap"?

[Rant] AMD is great, but I still prefer nvidia unless…

Long story short.

GTX 780 was $649. AMD released R9 290X at $549 which was faster (at stock) than GTX780. NVidia dropped the price of the GTX780 to $499. AMD released R9 290 for $399 which also beat GTX780 at stock. NVidia released GTX780 Ti for $699 which beat them all. (GTX 780Ti is great, but that’s out of budget for most people so we’ll ignore that it ever exists.)

Looks like the R9 290 is the winner. You can get two of them in Crossfire for $100 more than the GTX 780 Ti and they will beat it by a long margin. R9 290X seems already irrelevant because the performance difference between it and R9 290 is very little, well, at least in Quiet Mode.

There is one issue though. This is the only deal breaker for most people. There are no custom designed card available yet.

Why do you need them? Because the cooler on the R9 290/290X is crap. It is basically the same cooler that was on the R9 280X but with higher fan speed. The R9 290/290X GPUs run so hot that even with the increased fan speed, the GPU runs at 95C!!!

• Increased fan speed means, it is very loud.
• Increased temps mean you have very limited overclocking headroom.

This makes one wonder, what would happen if you are running the card in a hot environment? The card would be throttled so much that they would perform very badly against the competition. NVidia cards throttle too, but only 13MHz per 10C. Not a big deal.

[Rant] Price wars reloaded: AMD R9 290 is only $399!!!!

Nobody expected AMD to price their flagship R9 290X card at $549. But they did. Then everybody thought this would be a replay of HD7900 series launch - HD7970 at $549 and HD7950 at $449. No, AMD had other plans. They released the R9 290 at just $399. That's insane. 

OK, $399 is still not cheap. Not many people is going to spend that much money on the graphics card. Heck, most people are trying to get away with $399 for the entire PC. 

But if you are into this sort of thing, you would know that this is crazy. For $399, you are not getting a 20% slower card than the flagship. You are getting a card that is only 5% or less slower than the flagship card that costs $150 more. Basically, AMD only cut down the Stream Processors from 2,816 to 2,560 and maximum clock speed from 1000MHz to 947MHz. (Note: the gap widens if you put the R9 290X to Uber mode though.)

Funny thing is though, AMD was not anticipating that NVidia would respond with such soon price cuts on the GTX770 and GTX780 when the R9 290X came out. AMD didn't seem to have had any other price point targetted, but they seem to have a different performance point targeted. AMD delayed the R9 290's launch by a week, because they thought they had to do counter the counter act from NVidia. Instead of dropping the prices, they increased the performance of the R9 290. But what's interesting is how they did it. They didn't release a BIOS update or change any chip specific. They simply raised the max fan speed of the card from the default 40% to 47%. You must be wondering how that could affect the performance. But that mere 7% increase in fan speed made the card throttle less due to high temperature and allowed the core clock to stay at the max clock speed more often than not. It's actually amazing how much the card throttled at 40% max fan speed. Look at the chart below.

 

That last minute tuning made the card beat the stock GTX 780 most of the times. Sometimes even beating the $1000 NVidia Titan. Insane, right?

But the problem that I had with the R9 290X still persists with this card as well. Heat ⇒ Temps ⇒ Noise. With the R9 290 running at 47% at stock, it is significantly louder than the rest of the pack. But the good news is that cards with custom designed coolers are coming out at the end of this month. People that don't want to use a custom water loop probably are better off waiting for these cards. But at $399, I think you can excuse the card being a bit too loud. Use some headphones when you are gaming, dammit!

You can read a comprehensive review about the new card @ anandtech.com

[Rant] The inevitable price cuts on NVidia GTX 770 and GTX 780 are finally happening!

Price wars are great for the consumer. That's exactly what's going on in the high-end graphics card market. 

A week (or two?) ago AMD released their flagship graphics card, the R9 290X. (Check out Anandtech review here) It was priced fairly cheaper than the competition yet delivering performance similar to a card that's almost two times more expensive. Of course it is not a perfect card. The reference cards (which are the only ones available) run louder, hotter and draw a lot of power. However, the price to performance ratio excelled past the competition. 

If you thought NVidia was going to do nothing about it, then you are a fool. You can give a million fancy features (example) but in the end of the day, gamers want more performance and less price. Even though NVidia GeForce cards probably have a slight edge on that (features) department, people are going to settle for the faster and cheaper AMD card.

Hence, we have good news. NVidia has come to their senses. They are dropping prices on the GTX770 and GTX780. In fact, they are dropping prices by record levels this time around. Here's what's proposed by NVidia to the card vendors. 

GTX 770: $399 → $329

GTX780: $649 → $499

And that's not all. There is the GTX780 Ti. It packs impressive specs and leaked results claim that it is about 5% faster than the Titan. That's sweet and that actually would take the performance crown back to the green side. But the price isn't going to interest many gamers out there. $699. Ouch! Well, it is still better than the Titan if you have a 1440p or smaller display. But I still believe the R9 290X is better priced. Sure sure, you always get diminishing returns when you go up in the spectrum. 

On the other hand, leaked results show that the R9 290 (the non-X model) still is slightly faster than the GTX780. And that's coming out at $449 price mark. Hopefully it will run cooler than the 290X. That's the only problem with the 290X. Fortunately, if you are thinking of buying a R9 290X, it seems that the non-reference design cards are coming out next month. Let's hope that Twin Frozr cooler, DCUII cooler or Winforce3 cooler will keep the card running  below 80C. 

Would you choose a R9 290X over a GTX780 Ti because it is cheaper and only performs slightly slower? Would you choose the R9 290 over the GTX780 if they perform similarly? Would you get a GTX770 over a R9 280X even though they have almost the same price to performance ratio? I guess with the current pricing, you would be fine with either team.

[Rant] My thoughts on the AMD R7 and R9 graphic cards

The reviews on the new Graphics cards from and came out yesterday. The ones out are all re-brands  The truly new generation cards code named Hawaii are yet to come out. It seems they are coming out a week after. That's what most people are eagerly looking forward to.

The R9-280x is basically a HD7970 GHz edition card with a new cooler and different output options. It doesn't have True Audio technology that the 290 series and the 260 series seem to carry. ( makes one wonder if the 260x is a re-brand or a new card). But the good news is, it is not just a re-brand but also a repositioning in the price segment. It costs only $299 instead of the close to $400 price tag of the 7970.

The R7-270x is a re-branded 7870 but a little fast clocks. It also is going on sale for $199 which is about $40 cheaper than the 7870. The R7-260x is a re-branded 7790 (or so they say) but it is only slightly cheaper than the 7790. 

Basically speaking, the R7-270x and the R9-280x are the cards that give most bang for the buck. The R7-270x performs close to NVidia GTX760 which is $50 more expensive. R9-280x performs same as a NVidia GTX770 which is $100 more expensive. I don't care about the 260x really. So basically, for single card setups, there is no reason to buy a NVidia card below the GTX780. The GTX780 and the Titan are still uncontested though. But hopefully the R9-290 and R9-290x will have something to say about that. 

[Article] Upcoming AMD next generation graphics cards

The rumors point to an October release time frame for the next generation AMD graphics cards. Nobody knows what it will be called. It definitely won’t be HD8000 series because that name is already ruined by the underperforming mobile GPUs – rebrands of course. Some people say it will be called the HD9000 series, but some say AMD will come with a new naming scheme because there has already been a 9000 series (no HD prefix though) about 10 years ago. I remember getting my first high-end GPU – the Radeon 9700Pro, which died soon after the warranty expired. We’ll have to wait and see what AMD calls this new generation of cards, I hope it will be something that will be easy for the consumers to understand.

In the meantime, this won’t be a really big step up from the current generation. They will keep using the same 28nm process node, but since the manufacturing process had about 2 years to improve, we will still probably see higher clocks and/or better power efficiency. The performance will mainly be increased by increasing the number of stream processors. But as far as rumors say, the flagship card will only have like 2560 stream processors (25% more than HD7970) or less. The combination of increase in stream processors and clock speeds – core as well as memory – will decide how fast it will be in the end.

What matters to gamers in the end if how these cards will stack up against the competition. NVidia had much faster single GPU cards in the enthusiast segment, namely the GTX780 and Titan. If ATI will be able to match the performance of GTX780 but with a price tag of $500, I think that will be what we all gamers hope for. We all need that fastest single GPU graphics card to come at $500. $650 for the GTX780 is not ridiculous for the performance, but the Titan’s $1000 is. The GTX780 seems to overclock better than the Titan and in the end you get a faster card for $350 cheaper. You are paying that extra $350 for the extra 3GB memory. For a single display setup, you don’t need 6GB of Video RAM.

Anyways, I just hope ATI won’t shift the prices up. Plus, I hope they will bring some cool features that NVidia card owners are enjoying to the AMD card owners as well. For example, pixel clock overclocking is one. Then there is adaptive V-Sync. The upcoming Shadow Play technology seems brilliant too. On the other hand, AMD has a upper hand in the upcoming games (ahem, console ports) because  the next generation consoles are all based on AMD chips. Plus, their Never Settle Bundles are looking awesome.

What do you guys say? I already created a poll so let me know what you think.

Choosing a proper graphics card for your gaming PC

The most critical part of a gaming PC is the graphics card. Graphics card prices range up to $1000 but that does not mean you have to save $1000 to get a good gaming experience. As with everything, at the lower scale of the spectrum, you are getting very bad performance (only slightly better than integrated solutions from Intel and AMD) and at the higher scale of the spectrum, you are getting diminishing returns. Midrange is where the sweet spot lies for most people. I said "for most people" because it is not always the truth. Sometimes you have to bend the rules and go for the absolute highest end cards.

 

AMD vs. NVidia - which one is better?

This is a sensitive matter. You cannot go wrong with either brand. Here's a comparison between the two, and I suggest that you match up your requirements with those and see which one suits you best.

Advantages of going with AMD

• Gives better performance for the money you spend. (Might not be true in some parts of the world.
• You get an amazing free games bundle with the card.
• Has less performance drop when Anti-Aliasing is enabled/increased the level as well as resolution is increased.
• All next generation consoles are using AMD GPUs, and the games will probably be more optimized for AMD's GCN architecture. This is just an assumption.
• Usually overclocks a bit better than NVidia cards.
• Has much better general purpose compute performance.

 

Advantages of going with NVidia

• SLI works much, much better than Crossfire (at least as of now)
• Adaptive V-Sync support
• Ability to overclock the Pixel Refresh Rate of your display (how far your can overclock, depends on your display. I've managed to increase it from 60Hz to 69Hz on my Iiyama 27" display.)
• Has a little bit better power efficiency.
• People believe that NVidia drivers are usually more stable. But both companies put out buggy drivers every now and then.
• GeForce Experience service, which automatically sets the graphics settings in each game for the best gameplay experience. On top of that, you are getting a cool feature called Shadow Play in a few days.

Finally the real AMD Radeon HD7990 comes out!

AMD certainly took all of their sweet time to bring out their dual GPU behemoth – namely the HD7990 (or codenamed Malta). Before this official release, Power Color and Asus had dual HD7970 cards out and they even used the official HD7990 in their product names. But they were not well done. They needed three 8 pin PCI-E power connectors to juice up. That’s a lot of power. The new card – the real thing – needs only two of them. Probably AMD cherry picked the best GPUs coming out of the TSMC (or Global Foundry? or both?) fabs, thus using less power and even overclocking better. The card is rated at 375W TDP, as all the dual GPU cards that have come out in the last couple of years. Nothing surprising there. Perhaps AMD couldn’t fit it into 375W before the process technology matured. Now it is that time.

Not only you are getting pretty much the fastest graphics card in the world (maybe not as fast as the Asus Ares II – but it is the same blood that runs within the veins of both cards), you are getting 8 (you read it right, 8) free games with it. They are not shabby games by any means; most of them, it not all of them are the flagship games that came out in the end of last year and this year so far.

But is anyone interested about it? I am not. Because this card basically runs in Crossfire mode and according to the suite of reviews we’ve seen that come out in the last few months about frame latency and such, Crossfire is doing horribly in most games. You might see higher FPS numbers with this card compared to the GeForce Titan or even the GeForce GTX690, but game play isn’t smooth. Hence the HD7990 couldn’t have come out at a worse time.

Note: I do know how bad Crossfire was because I had a couple of HD6950’s in Crossfire before I moved to a single GTX670. Yes, I know it is slower on paper. But in reality, it is not. The gaming on a single card is so much satisfying. I know what I had was old generation cards, and it is true that I don’t have first hand experience when it comes to HD7000 series cards in Crossfire, but a lot of people are complaining about it. It is about time somebody did something about it, instead of saying that these problems are inherent to multi GPU setups and there isn’t anything you can do about it.

But…there is good news. AMD is actually making progress in fixing this issue. There is already a prototype driver given to the reviewers to test, and it certainly does the trick. There seems to be a small performance penalty – but it is actually not. Because the performance was much worse to begin with – the real performance I mean. And according to preliminary results posted on PCPer.com, it seems AMD have done it. Yes, this is just a prototype driver and there are a lot of things they need to do before pushing it out to the customers. But I like to see that there is some hope. Now that AMD is on right track, I just hope the review sites will show them some respect.

But as of this day, HD7990 is not a good buy. Wait a couple of months and see how things go. I know it cannot get any worse and AMD can only rise up from this mess.

Read W1zaard’s review here.

GeForce 700 series is seemingly coming in 2014

Most people were hoping to see the next generation of graphics cards from both AMD and NVidia within this year because it has already been more than a year since both companies released their current generation cards. Even if they launched the new cards towards the end of this year, it would still conform to the usual 18 month product cycle. But few weeks ago AMD said that they are not going to release the 8000 series this year because they are in the opinion that if they did a rush up job, people would crucify them for releasing a new product without a significant increase in performance over the current generation. Things would get even worse because NVidia's next generation architecture seems to bump up the performance significantly - at least performance to watt ratio wise.

Today Tom's Hardware reports that NVidia is also delaying their next generation to next year for some unknown reason. Both of these companies don't really need to release new cards because the current generation is more than competent enough to tackle the games available today. Unless 2560x1440 resolution becomes mainstream - which is unlikely to happen anytime soon - there is no need for more power in the "sanity circle" (i.e. mainstream segment) But there are people with 2560x1440 screens and triple display setups and they really need the future horse power today. But for those people, there's something called SLI and Crossfire, if you haven't already heard.

Even though you can combine multiple graphics cards and make then work together to gain a boost over a single card, AMD has a problem with their design. Ryan Shrout at PCPer.com has recently found out that AMD's multi GPU solution does not deliver better performance than a single card in many of the games out there. The cards do their work but the frames are not properly spread out to give the fluidity and that 2nd card's work is not perceived by human eye. The fix is not a simple driver fix but they'll probably find a temporary solution for this problem in the coming days. NVidia has a mechanism in hardware to tackle this problem so NVidia does not have this problem. I'm sure the HD8000 series is already past its design phase and they cannot use the same trick as what NVidia is doing in the HD8000 series. AMD will have to find a way to fix this probe in the driver or they would lose performance in the enthusiast segment who uses multiple high-end cards in their rigs.

Back on to the topic. Are you really mad that the next generation cards are delayed? If you are building a new PC, maybe you are. But if you already own a high-end card like the GTX670/680/690/Titan or HD7950/7970, you should be happy that $400~$1000 card won't be outdated for another year, right? I am glad that mine isn't getting outdated soon. It's not that I have to upgrade even if they released the new generation. I don't play a lot of games. Right now I only play Crysis 3 and nothing else. If I disable AA, I can get 60fps in it, so there isn't really a need to get a newer card. But there is the upgrade itch. When that happens, there is no going back.

So all in all, I'm glad that newer cards aren't right around the corner. I probably can spend that money on the Haswell upgrade if my wife doesn't have any fancy plans.

AMD HD7970 vs. NVidia GTX680: FPS vs. Frame Latency

Until a year or so ago, all the graphics card reviewers were going by the conclusion: more FPS ⇒ smoother gameplay. Sure, there isn’t anything wrong with that conclusion, if you keep rest of the parameters the same. But that actually is not the case.

People who have bought AMD’s HD7900 series high-end cards have been really pissed to find out that their gameplay is not actually as smooth as those reviewers suggest. 60FPS means pretty smooth gameplay. You might not see any difference between 60FPS and anything higher. Funny thing is that, people are actually getting the FPS that the reviewers claim – there is no mistake there. But for some reason, gameplay isn’t smooth. You would see pauses every few seconds. If you run a frame rate counter, such as FRAPS or MSI Afterburner, you would not notice any glitches. But you are NOT feeling that the gameplay corresponds to which the FPS counter is showing.

Guess what? That’s because of “micro-stuttering”. The phenomenon called micro-stuttering happens when a certain frame takes abnormally longer to render than the previous subsequent frames did, and his being repeated over and over the entire time. (That last part is important to create the illusion of stutter.) If you plot the frame times in a graph, you would see spikes appearing roughly in similar gaps. Funny thing is, if you average out the FPS, you would not see a drop. That’s why you cannot go with just the FPS.

Look at the following example.

Say, you are getting 50fps in your game. It could either be that all of your frames took 20ms each to render (1000ms per second/20ms per frame = 50fps), or it could be that the first 49frames took 19 seconds each (931ms total), and the last one took 69ms to render. 50 frames, 1000ms ⇒ 50fps It would still give the 50FPS, but you would be seeing terrible micro-stuttering in the latter case.

How to plot the graph of FRAPS frame times easily

If your gameplay isn’t smooth or is laggy even with a reasonably high FPS (above 40fps), chances are that your PC setup is causing micro-stuttering. You cannot do much about it other than try a different driver or hope that AMD/NVidia will fix it in the next driver update or play with the graphics settings.

If you want to make sure that it indeed is micro-stuttering, you can activate the “benchmark mode” in FRAPS (free version is limited in functionality), which creates few files in the benchmark folder that you specify, one of which cane be used to plot a graph of frame times. The file that we are interested in is the one that ends with “frametimes.csv”. (For example, farcry3_d3d11 2013-02-16 13-16-37-40 frametimes.csv).

You can either use Excel to plot the graph but it requires a bit of work first. The easy way to do is by using the small tool called FRAFS Bench Viewer.

You can download it from HERE.

What you do is, you install FRAFS Bench Viewer and drag and drop the **** frametimes.csv file to the main window. Then, voila, the frame time graph would be plotted. Easy stuff.

AMD Video Converter missing in Catalyst 11.4?

I was looking for the video converter in the Catalyst Control Center with 11.4 driver, and could not find it. There was only one option to check or uncheck. “Enable Acceleration”. it said,

Your system includes a video converter that automatically converts video files when they are dragged and dropped onto a portable media player. You graphic hardware can be used to accelerate the conversion process.

That’s all. But I remember that there used to be a button to start the video converter. There was an application built into the CCC. But it looks like, it doesn’t come with the main driver package any longer. I do not know from which version onwards though.

So I went into the ATI driver download page and found out that, under optional downloads, it listed a something called “AMD Media Codec Package”. The description was this.

Previously known as the Avivo(TM) Package

  Package Includes:

  AMD Video Converter*

  Media codecs for transcoding applications

  *AMD Video Converter will only work with ATI Radeon HD 2000 and above