Measuring game performance can be quite tricky. It’s not just about average frames per second; frame time is also important. It was highlighted with the launch gotham knights, where while the game runs well overall with a decent average frame rate, it has major issues with frame times. This is a real problem, because while frame time is an abstract thing for most gamers, it’s a vital metric when evaluating how well a game actually performs.
Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water; frame rate is still just as important. But frame time reveals a lot about how a game can feel during gameplay, and it goes beyond just how many frames your system can output every second. We’ll help you demystify what frame time is, how you can measure it, and why you should pay attention to it when looking at your gaming PC’s performance.
Frame time versus frames per second
Most gaming benchmarks are expressed in frames per second, or fps. Frame rate counters and benchmarking software work by capturing a second of gameplay, checking how many frames were rendered in that second, and then adding that to the moving average. For example, if a game generated 62, 64, 58, and 56 fps in a four second interval, the game would average 60 fps. But a second is a long time in a fast-paced game, and not all of those frames will render equally, some frames will render faster than others. The frame time is the time that passes between each of those frames, the answer to the question, “How much time passes between each frame?”
Using the same 60fps, the frame time would be (theoretically) 16.6ms or 1/60th of a second. You can do this with any other number of frames per second. 1/144 of a second would mean that there is a frame every 6.9 ms. Just divide one by your average frames per second, then multiply by 1000 to get the frame time in milliseconds.
It’s a good exercise in understanding the time frame, but it’s not helpful because it’s unrealistic. Frame time is important because it varies. In a second where there are 60 frames, those frames aren’t usually evenly spaced at 16.6ms, and if the variance is high enough, gameplay won’t be as smooth. Carry gotham knights as an example. While the game runs at a locked average of 60fps in the chart above, it does have frame time spikes well in excess of 100ms. This causes the game to appear choppy and choppy, even though it is running at the intended frame rate.
Both frames per second and frame times are important to consider when evaluating a game, and comparison tools like CapFrameX make it easy to graph frame times. One is not objectively better than the other. They are looking at two sides of the same coin. The frame rate tells you the overall level of performance, while the frame time gives you more information about the experience of playing the game.
And they are connected to each other. Above you can see the number of frames per second over time corresponding to the frame time graph on the page. As the frame time increases, the number of frames decreases, and vice versa.
Extract more data outside the time frame
Frame time is abstract because, frankly, gaming performance has been measured in frames per second for decades. However, there are some additional metrics you can extract from frame time to better understand game consistency. Most of the time, the ones you’ll see in GPU reviews (including ours) are low 1% prices.
This number, sometimes called the 99th percentile, takes the lowest 1% of frames in the data set and calculates its average. Essentially, the low 1% values represent the highest frame times and therefore the lowest frame rates in the data set. When you see a big gap, it means that the frametime is bad and the game is not smooth even if you achieve the desired average framerate.
God of WarFor example, the PC port has very consistent frame times. You can see it in the table above. The average of 75.7 fps and the low 1% fps of 62.6 are relatively close, with a difference of around 19%, which indicates that the game is running smoothly. Compare that with gotham Knights, where there is a 58% difference between an average fps of 49.4 and a 1% lower fps of 27.2.
Fps and 1% low fps aren’t perfect indicators, but they still sum up game performance on given hardware. You can view frametime as raw data, and framerate as an abstraction of that data that’s easier to digest and compare to other games or hardware. If you saw two graphs of frame times for two different GPUs, that says a lot less about their performance against each other than comparing the average frame rate those GPUs achieved in a game.
It is important to remember that these metrics are only as good as the context in which they are presented. Frame time is crucial for evaluating game performance, but frame rate is much more useful for seeing the scale between different hardware. It’s all a matter of perspective and purpose.
How to improve frame time in games
Frame times are often an issue with the game, the driver, or some step in between. In other words, it’s hard to fix frame-time issues if you encounter them. gotham knights is a good recent example. The frame-time issues are a result of shader compilation stalling, which is an issue we’ve encountered. elden ring at the beginning of this year.
One thing you can do to improve the situation is to set a frame rate cap. This won’t fix frametime issues like shader compilation, but it can help with framerates in poorly optimized games. Many games include a built-in frame rate limit, but you can also set this using your graphics card’s software. For Nvidia, go to nvidia control panelchoose Manage 3D settings, and establish max number of frames per second low global settings eyelash. AMD has a similar feature in Radeon Software called Frame Rate Target Control (FRTC).
However, in many cases, poor frame times and frame rates are the result of drivers and games. Your best bet is to update your video card drivers and wait for a patch to come out. Closing background apps and optimizing your PC for gaming can also help, but only on titles that don’t already have frame rate issues.
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Categories: GAMING
Source: newstars.edu.vn