Recent content by Arseface

I agree that the ZR30W is a fantastic screen (I own one too) :) It's looking like I'm going to have to sell it though, as it won't talk to my other two screens in an nvidia surround setup (Hazro HZ30Wi - also with a low input lag at 14ms). In theory I could sell the two Hazros, and replace...

I'm having problems trying to switch the sync polarity of one of my screens... I have an HP ZR30W (30" 2560*1600 screen), and recently bought two Hazro HZ30Wi (same size and res) to work with my pair of GTX480s in an nvidia surround setup. Surround would not configure, giving me a message...

To briefly address your points: First, as has been stated many times, under CPU-limited circumstances you will see very little microstutter, as the GPU output syncs to the regular output of the CPU. I don't have civ 5 to test, but I can't imagine it's GPU intensive enough to stress a 5970...

Read the thread I have on the subject. Like I said, it isn't a "noticeable" phenomenon, in that you look at a game scene and say "hey, this is stuttering". It just works to reduce the apparent framerate down from what the thread counter says. In other words, 60fps with microstutter is not the...

Any chance you can consider framerate irregularity (aka "microstutter") when comparing the two setups? This phenomena has a real impact on the performance of a setup, which does not show up in raw-FPS benchmarks. If you're interested I wrote a program to quantify the apparent performance...

Um... :confused: The name is not representative, I agree, and micro-fluctuations is a better way of describing the effect. I said in my original post that microstutter was a crappy name for the effect, as it is not really stuttering. But micro-fluctuation is precisely what I am measuring...

Yes, you should :) As NKDietrich pointed out, adding a second GPU still improves real-world performance in almost all circumstances. First, consider GPU-limited circumstances (which will be most of the time in demanding games at 2560 res). Adding a second GPU will generally net you a 70 to...

I'm hoping / expecting that HL3 is one of them. I think valve realised at some stage that the idea of episodic content wasn't really compatible with their "flagship" half-life title, since it takes so much time to refine and polish a high-quality FPS like that. It seems natural that episode 3...

Thanks for the reply, Argh - it's good to see someone else trying to draw attention to the microstutter problem! I completely agree that the lack of attention from review sites is contributing to the issue to being ignored or underestimated in the community. I think that if just one major review...

As I mentioned before, it's not something you can really "just notice". The difference between microstutter and regular drop in FPS is, for the most part, indistinguishable. It's only when the framerate drops to a crawl (say <25fps), when you can catch individual frames being output, that you...

Thanks for the support, butterflysrpretty :) Perhaps I am overreacting... I don't really believe that there is some big conspiracy not to address microstutter. But, I do believe that it will take more awareness before anything is done about it - particularly because addressing it will require...

The problem is, anything that can be done to reduce microstutter will mean at least a small reduction in average framerate (either switching to a "multiple GPUs, single frame" rendering method, or delaying output of frames in AFR mode). Since it's the average framerate that sells cards (via...

I agree completely. I dislike the idea of AFR - irregular frame output is inevitable. Unfortunately, it's the mode which requires the least communication between GPUs, and so offers the best multi-GPU scaling in average FPS benchmarks. Since this is what the performance of the cards is judged...

Ignore the graphs - they are just for illustration. In the program I posted above, I have simply applied well known statistics to the data, in order to produce a non-dimensional quantification of the framerate variation away from a local mean. This gives a perception-independent...

Thanks :) I ran that frametime log in the program, and it came out with an idex of ~18 - similar to the GTX480s under full load in crysis: Worryingly however, looking closer at the frametime log there seems to be large periods of virtually no microstutter, mixed in with some periods of...