Gadgetory

what's up guys welcome back hope you're doing well so some of you may have noticed that I recently switched up my benchmarking methodology about several weeks ago by discontinuing the presentation of minimum frame rates in favor of one percent and point one percent lows but since then I've seen a lot of confusion in the comments as to what exactly these metrics means so today I'm gonna explain what they are and why you should care about them the first thing to realize here is that minimum frame rates are peer garbage which I'll expand on later and secondly average frame rates alone don't tell the whole story because they're not all created equal that's why an average of 80 fps on one PC can sometimes look or feel worse than 60 FPS on another clearly there is another metric at play here that's missing from this graph and so many others like it and that metric is called frame times which is a concept that was heavily pushed by Scott Watson formerly of tech report as a means of measuring performance and while I'm gonna sum it up as best as I can today I've linked his detailed article on the matter in the description for those of you interested now frame times are simply the number of milliseconds between frames which technically means that they can be represented as a frame rate by basic arithmetic a sixteen point six six millisecond frame time would equate to 60 fps with lower frame times indicating higher frame rates now to see how this metric impacts performance let's use our first hypothetical PC let's say the first frame it renders stays on screen for 10 milliseconds then frame 2 appears for another 10 milliseconds so far so good but when frame 3 comes around there's a technical hiccup of some sort which causes it to stay on screen for 80 milliseconds and suddenly this drastic spike in frame times breaks the once fluid illusion of motion it's kind of like a flipbook getting stuck for a moment on one of its pages if this behavior is repeatable the game can quickly become unplayable and what's worse is that this can occur but still output a favorable average frame rate which makes average FPS a poor metric for measuring user experience when frame times aren't accounted for now taking a look at our second hypothetical PC that scored 60 FPS on average you can see frame 1 appears for around 16 as does frame two in fact all the frames are pretty evenly spaced apart which provides an overall smoother experience than PC number one despite having higher frame times overall so it's not necessarily just about having the lowest possible frame times but having frame times that are consistent with minimal variance between one another how should we attempt to measure this you ask enter one percent end point one percent lows which getting to the meat of this video is just a short way of saying the slowest one percent in point one percent of frames that occurred during a run since most built-in benchmarks these days lack any frame time monitoring capabilities I use a combination of fraps and fraps to free lightweight utilities which can handle these tasks so after recording and analyzing a particular benchmark run fraps picks out the slowest 1% of frames based on their frame times averages said frame times and presents that value as a frame rate then it's rinse and repeat with 0.1% of the slowest frames what you end up with are two values that illustrate a group of crappy frames with 1% lows being the group that comes around more often that you're more likely to notice additionally the larger the gap between these values and your average frame rate the more likely your gameplay will suffer which is why a video card that yields similar or even slightly worse averages may still be the better choice if it delivers an overall tighter frame output now I have to give credit where credit is due this one in point 1% presentation style was heavily popularized by Steven Burke and the team at gamers Nexus they saw the value in Scott Watson's testing methods but realize the average user would find frame time charts a bit confusing so they began converting the frame times back into FPS at their 1% in point 1% values to make the data more relatable and easier to digest gamers Nexus does some great work so I'll throw down a few links to their website and channel in the description at this point it should be pretty clear why measuring a sample size of slow frames is more sensible than looking at a single minimum frame rate I mean it pains me to think that I ever gave any attention to a single frame for so long and yeah it sucks it's the worst of all the frames and for that it should be beaten and publicly ridiculed but in no way does that tell you anything about your gaming experience because it's not a repeatable havior it's just one frame nor is it reliable I mean you could run that same benchmark again and you might yield a drastically different frame rate the second time around which is why this metric is an outlier that draws no real conclusions on overall performance okay the minimum frame rate is like a random fat guy who just stumbled into a 10k marathon all right you wouldn't see him in a crowd of thousands of in shape runners and think what a sluggish bunch no he probably just got lost on his way to Blizzcon or something all right he's an outlier so everyone just stopped giving a about minimum frame rates but that's pretty much the gist of it and hopefully that clear some things up I personally plan to keep one percent in point one percent lows in my testing methodology as long as they continue providing valuable insight into the hardware that I review or until something better comes along to replace them if you're still a little confused on anything feel free to leave any questions you might have in the comments and I'll do my very best to look through them and answer them when I get a chance before you guys go don't forget to toss me a like on the video if you enjoyed it and also feel free to check out bit wit ultra where you can watch videos like this one early without ads for a buck video months totally worth it maybe definitely not as always some cowl up no I'm still doing that so as I'm kind of a bid wid thank you guys for watching subscribe to the channel if you haven't already and I'll see y'all in the next