Frame latency is the big thing everyone is talking about these days with video cards. So much so that Nvidia conveniently released a tool to accurately measure this one statistic that, under certain circumstances, shows Nvidia's cards to be superior to AMD's cards. I'm guessing that's because Nvidia's shit doesn't stink. They didn't email me back on that.
Anywho, it's been said at least twice by Logan on both The Tek and Inbox that AMD cards may run at higher framerates, but the animation is not as smooth because the frame latency is higher. I was paraphrasing, but neither how I said it, nor how Logan has said it on Youtube, states or even implies that the frame latency issues are exclusive to multi-GPU setups.
Logan said it again yesterday on The Tek, so I thought I should look it up, since I had only ever heard of this issue existing for Crossfire setups. The most recent measure of frame latencies I could find was here: http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/Frame-Rating-High-End-GPUs-Benchmarked-4K-Resolutions. That's from just yesterday.
This is Battlefield 3, traditionally an Nvidia-favoring game. The 7970 not only beats the 680 at framerate (lower frametime = higher framerate), but also at frame latency (thinner and smoother line = less latency). It even beats the Titan at latency.
Same goes for Crysis 3, except all the single cards are a bit more jittery here. None of them would likely be noticeably jittery. Same story goes for Sleeping Dogs, Dirt 3, and Skyrim (though skyrim is always jittery).
This:
... is the latency issue people are talking about. That looks like an offensive amount of latency, but people can't even agree on whether or not that mess is noticeable in actual gameplay. The little 2-3 frame jitters in the single card tests are absolutely unnoticeable, and even that tiny chunk of latency was at a ridiculous resolution.
So..... implying that the issue extends to single cards, what gives? Where's the test I haven't seen?
Bookmarked for future arguement reference. :D
The reason you see the 7970 being more consistent in the single card tests in because those tests are run at 3840 x 1260. As many people know, Nvidia cards only sport 2GB of RAM and a 256-bit memory bus vs. the AMD cards have 3GB and a 384-bit memory bus. This means that when playing at extreme resolutions such as this, the Nvidia cards will bottleneck at certain times which causes the inconsistencies.
As for dual-GPU solutions, the high frame latency that still plagues the AMD cards would be pretty noticable. Tom's Hardware did an overview of the 7990, and they had 5 people (yes it's a small number but that's all they could get) play Battlefield 3 on the 690 and the 7990, not telling which is which, and asked them which was smoother. The 690 won unanimosely. So until the prototye drivers are released by AMD, dual gpu solutions will be stuttery for them. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-7990-review-benchmark,3486-13.html
Now, as for single card frame latency, I don't know where people got the idea that the AMD cards are super stuttery. It's likely just a thing some Nvidia fanboys cooked up, and should be ignored.
... whut? there was a 4 gig 680 tested dude.
And there was a Titan in the single-GPU tests. Titan has 6 gigs of VRAM and a 386-bit memory bus, and the 3 gig 7970 was smoother in Battlefield.
I didn't say noticeably smoother, because it's not, and it would probably go back and forth a lot depending on the game you're playing, just like framerate does.
I know the claim that single-GPU AMD cards are stuttery is false and should be ignored, and a lot of people who hang around this forum probably know that. The problem is when Logan says it on the Tek to his 100k+ subscribers.
Yea its noit down to the Memory Bus or bandwidth, its down to how the card is actually rendering the frames, its also such a small discernable difference in latency for the single cards it would be impossible to tell when using either.
as for the crossfire the issue is there, but is not as noticable unless you are specifically looking for it while playing a game, and AMD has even announced that a fix is coming in a month or two, so it will soon be a non issue.
@ OP, i agree with your sentiment towrds what was said, irked me a little bit to because a lot of people take what is on the tek as absolute fact and the info wasnt correct.
logan is just as dependent on others for his information as we are, at least as far as the TEK goes. maybe more so, because he doesn't have time to thoroughly research stuff.
