AMD Catalyst 13.8 Beta Frame Pacing CrossFire Driver Has stuttering with CrossFire been getting you down? Today may make many AMD CrossFire owners happy. Catalyst 13.8 Beta includes Frame Pacing technology to create a more fluid CrossFire experience. At least up to 2560x1600 resolution, for now. Does it really do the job? Amd Catalyst 13 5 Beta 2 Blockers MechanismWe investigate this and tell you what the gameplay experience is like. Introduction Today, AMD is releasing a new Beta driver to the public, this will be. Normally we don't dedicate an entire article to a Beta driver release, unless there is some big new feature or news to report. This is such a case. Inside this driver is a new technology called Frame Pacing. This is AMD's answer to smoothing out and creating a more consistent and fluid gameplay experience with CrossFire. For a long time NVIDIA has benefited from technology in its drivers to smooth out SLI, AMD is finally catching up. However, read-on, there are some caveats. Let's backtrack a little. For as long as we have been evaluating multi-GPU configurations we've been relating to you the gameplay experience delivered. This means a lot of things. Primarily, this means not only what performance is like, but more importantly the actual feel and consistency while gaming on said multi-GPU configuration. If you look back, we have years and years of editorial content and commentary in each multi-GPU review telling you how we experienced gaming on hardware. You will find a common thread as you read back over all of our evaluations. The common thread has always been that NVIDIA's SLI has been smoother and maintained a better consistency compared to AMD's CrossFire. Sometimes you could see this in the framerate on our graphs. However, most of this fluidity is related to the frame times. While we lacked the tools at the time to show you this smoothness and consistency difference, we didn't really need any tools other than actually sitting down, and playing games, to see the difference. In fact, is you ask NVIDIA as to why it built its FCAT frame time montioring software and gave it to reviewers, it is because of what the engineers there read on HardOCP and they wanted to investigate further. This is the heart of what we do, we play the games. Through this method of evaluation, which is exactly what the gamer does while playing, we've experienced consistently NVIDIA's SLI feeling smoother at lower framerates compared to AMD's CrossFire, which needed higher framerates to feel smooth. What this meant is that games felt fluid and smooth, with no stuttering, and a consistent framerate, at lower tolerable framerates, such as 30-50-FPS on NVIDIA SLI. However, with AMD's CrossFire we often had to maintain higher average framerates, to get the same smoothness and fluidity, often times in the 50-60FPS+ range. The reason for the inconsistency we experience in AMD CrossFire is because inherently, AMD's CrossFire was not outputting the same frame time durations. There were some frames that rendered longer, and some that rendered shorter, or some frames that didn't even render completely. In recent times, this frame time inconsistency has come into the limelight in a big way as has been reported by other websites. We wonder what took them so long to see what we were seeing? For years we've been reporting this gameplay difference by simply playing games as they were intended on both hardware configurations. Score another point for real world gaming hardware reviews. AMD Catalyst ™ 15.5 Beta for Windows ® This driver release is recommended for The Witcher 3 - Wild Hunt and Project Cars. This article provides information on the latest posting of the AMD Catalyst™ Software Suite, AMD Catalyst™ 15.5 Beta. The latest version of the AMD Catalyst™ Software Suite, AMD Catalyst™ 14.9 is designed to support the following Microsoft Windows platforms: Windows 8.1 (32 & 64-bit version) Windows 7 (32 & 64-bit version with SP1 or higher). The bottom line is that we did not, and do not need FCAT to tell us if our gaming experience is not the best it could be. That said, we understand how many of our readers have been looking for objective data on this particular point. At any rate, this greater scope and focus on the inconsistencies in AMD's CrossFire has lead to some tools finally showing promise in showing us exactly what we've been seeing for so long. NVIDIA developed a program called FCAT as mentioned above, which is able to output your gameplay via a capture card to a separate system and then use tools to analyze frames and the time between frames. Other websites have grabbed hold of this tool as the Holy Grail to demonstrate frame time issues. Amd Catalyst Control Center BetaRecently, we have built our own FCAT system and have had personal assistance and demonstration from NVIDIA in how to use it. Unfortunately, it's not something that is easily transformed into meaningful data in the way we can publish information, and is very involved to use in the first place. In our case specific monitors were needed as there were incompatibility issues with our displays we normally use. That said, we are investigating how best to use FCAT to show you, our readers, information that is useful to you in a meaningful way. Keep in mind that we have been telling our readers about smoothness issues literally for years, be it in an subjective sense rather than the FCAT objective way. We have argued the need for FCAT at all and the fact that looking at FCAT data can also be misleading when it comes to evaluating actually gameplay impacts. Amd Catalyst Software Suite BetaWe have plans to first investigate NVIDIA's SLI and AMD's CrossFire in its own article based on real-world gameplay experience. Then, we will follow-up with a data driven article, using FCAT, for those that find that useful. However, this AMD Beta driver is not final yet, and is being released in phases. The final phase won't be out for quite a while, potentially a month. We want to summarize the differences between NVIDIA SLI and AMD CrossFire in a separate article and do it right, providing real meaningful gameplay and data to get to a final conclusion between those. Time is needed to accomplish this. We personally feel that simply playing the game, and relating the gameplay experience, is the best way to tell you what the real deal is when it comes to gaming. Also, FCAT right now has a problem with the Catalyst 13.8 Beta driver, reported by AMD, which causes it to provide falsely dropped frames right now. Therefore, FCAT is unreliable with this driver. To quote AMD: 'You might have come across scenarios while testing this driver, where FCAT reports 15 dropped frames, in some applications, fairly consistently. These are not dropped frames. The way FCAT works with frames and color bars, is whenever its 16 color bar sequence is interrupted, it interprets that as dropped frames. We’re working on resolving a glitch in our driver that is causing FCAT to incorrectly report dropped frames.'
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