GeForce GTX 1070 FCAT Frametime Anaysis Review @ Guru3D

Several years ago there was a "shake up" in the review world in the way that cards were tested.  Some sites took the route that the gaming experience was the most important factor so they focused on what was needed to make the game look and perform the best.  Other sites took charge and started looking at why Average FPS (Frames Per Second) wasn't always a good indicator of overall performance. 

Basically, they are using math to justify why card A was faster than card B when in fact card B was actually better.

Out of these discussions came a program from nVidia called FCAT (Frame Capture Analysis Tool) and would capture video data after it was processed and on its way to the monitor.  The benefit here was it gave you data that was independent of the hardware.

Problem is, it takes a LOT of fast SSDs to capture the data and isn't something the average user can use on their own.  I'm of the opinion that benchmarks on review websites should be something the end user can replicate on their own.  Sadly that has become "unpopular", likely due to the vocal users not paying much attention to the numbers anymore and drinking too much of the koolaid.

The very impressionable GeForce GTX 1070 has been reelased, in this review we will be analyzing frame time/pacing in combination with FCAT. With FCAT (Frame Capture Analysis Tool) we can easily detect and visiualize if there are any problems related to rendering content in terms of stuttering or oddities.

We now have updated binaries and are DirectX 12 compatible meaning we can add the latest DX12 titles into this article as well. To check all this, we revert to our FCAT measuring setup, which we'll explain again in the next few pages. This technique allows us to record each frame rendered precisely up to the millisecond. The beauty of this technique is that it measures at the monitor output side, that means everything you can observe with your eyes (or not) is measured.

I will admit some of the data you can get from FCAT is really cool, even if it doesn't mean much in the real world.

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