This is one of the best GPU articles I have ever read
Scott Wasson from The Tech Report is one of the best in the industry, and he just wrote an article that explores the concept of microstutter, and how it impacts the overall gaming experience.
You can read the article over here. The long and short of it is that the traditional "FPS" value doesn't mean much when compared to the amount of time it takes to draw each frame within that second. On occasion, one of those frames will take much longer to draw than the rest (maybe 8-10x as long), which will cause the game to hitch and stutter.
He shows how you could even have a game that has perfectly playable FPS, but would be totally unplayable because it's frequently taking much too long to render an individual frame. This gums up the works for several frames afterwards, and it's more than enough for the (tremendously) acute human visual system to detect.
As a refresher, the human eye can detect hundreds of frames per second. The Internet has, unfortunately, gone to great lengths to understate the eye's capabilities as it works overtime to conflate the technical capabilities of today's display tech with our own biological ability.
You can read the article over here. The long and short of it is that the traditional "FPS" value doesn't mean much when compared to the amount of time it takes to draw each frame within that second. On occasion, one of those frames will take much longer to draw than the rest (maybe 8-10x as long), which will cause the game to hitch and stutter.
He shows how you could even have a game that has perfectly playable FPS, but would be totally unplayable because it's frequently taking much too long to render an individual frame. This gums up the works for several frames afterwards, and it's more than enough for the (tremendously) acute human visual system to detect.
As a refresher, the human eye can detect hundreds of frames per second. The Internet has, unfortunately, gone to great lengths to understate the eye's capabilities as it works overtime to conflate the technical capabilities of today's display tech with our own biological ability.
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Comments
It's great to see some basic statistics being used intelligently. The world is a complicated place, but as long as people want it to be simple there will always be the "fps bar graph" which will never tell the whole story. This is refreshing, but won't be the norm in my lifetime. Nice find!
Edit: Also, frame metering sounds like cheating but I guess it works...maybe.