Gadgetory

so as you've seen in our FPS charts for different reviews video cards CPUs so forth we report FPS in three metrics there's the average FPS 1% lows and 0.1% lows it could also be called 99th percentile 99.9 percent I'll but what do those things actually mean I've discussed this kind of briefly in an asked GN episode we in every single article with review we post this information and that's always in the in the link in the description but just to kind of make a dedicated video to this one percent lows and 0.1% blows that's our way of conveying frame times that a means that that I think is a little bit easier to read in comparison to the average FPS so what are frame times frame times and frame pacing this is something that Scott Watson formerly of tech report really heavily drove as a new metric to review products and when I saw the post years ago it really made a lot of sense to me so we adopted it what he was doing is sort of frame time testing he called it and this looks at the average or overall millisecond disparity between frame a to frame B so if you're looking at say frame number one versus frame number two maybe there's an eight millisecond difference between them if you're on crossfire or something like that and then maybe frame number two to frame number three there's a 20 millisecond difference this creates a very perceptible sort of latency to the user that you can pick up in your game play it'll feel like something has slowed down you might use colloquial terms like frame drops or stutters it can introduce tearing it really it just depends on the game and what's going on but that's kind of what frame times are it's the milliseconds between frames and this number is not necessarily shown in average FPS numbers that's why we've moved away from a pure average and to that end using just an average will sort of obfuscate these occasional low dips in your frame rate that may be seen in real gameplay as a frame drop so this a really good example of this this is a we've got a tray of CPUs this is AG three two five eight Intel Pentium CPU and the G three two five eight and some of our reviews using this product it does pretty well until you really throw a heavily multi-threaded game at it and as an example in GTA 5 the and the seven sixty K will actually perform on average worse than the g3 two five eight it's about 10 FPS lower average so in our testing I don't remember the exact numbers off my head but it was something like 76 vs. 65 FPS average something like that for 1080p with the settings we used but the three to five eight is actually worse or was worse at that time with those settings and that's because the the three to five eight would introduce the stuttering as you play so as you're playing GTA with this particular processor there will be very jarring and hard sort of stops and the frame output its a latency and this happens because the frame time in milliseconds between one frame and the next will occasionally spike maybe 50 milliseconds something like that and what matters here is more the offset than the actual absolute value so if you've got really consistent frame time say every frame is twenty milliseconds apart that's really it's not fantastic but it's not bad and as long as everyone is twenty milliseconds apart then it's really not that big of an issue because it appears fluid but when you start having disparity in your frame times maybe one frame is 16 milliseconds the next one is 24 milliseconds now we get some stuttering and it gets worse as you increase that disparity the percentage difference between frame times so with the three to five eight in that example what we're seeing is a high average but it's actually kind of unplayable because occasionally there'll be a really hard hit to your frame rate where it might stutter or frame drop or whatever word you want to use lag for a fraction of a second and it's long enough to really if you're trying to aim at someone and shoot them you get that stutter suddenly you're not aiming at the right anymore so that's where this testing methodology came from but what are the 1% lows and point 1 percent low as well we take this the frame times we take the overall a test period which is 30 seconds we look at 30 seconds of frame data we look at every single frame output versus the frame time and we create an average fps and I pull from that one percent of the the slowest 1% of frames and then we pull again the slowest point one percent of frames and the reason this is done is to show very clearly what the converted FPS value is of those very slow two frames and that's because we don't want to use a minimum a lot of older testing methodology would use a minimum and a maximum frame rate which really very honestly here is totally useless because if it is actually a minimum and not some sort of normalized value the actual minimum is an outlier and may not be representative of actual gameplay if we ran a game with 10 test passes we might see minimums that have a range of 100 FPS which is a massive range totally unreliable and unusable as a metric but if we average the slowest 1% of those frames suddenly we have something that is more normal repeatable representative of a real everyday gaming experience so that's where the 1% in point one percent loads come from what do they mean well now generally if you have say the fury X is another good example a product like the fury X performs pretty well in average frame rates but in some games and we have charts to show this in some games the point 1 percent will be so low that we might actually recommend something like even a 390 X instead and in the case of that particular example it may be because the 4 gigabyte versus 8 gigabyte disparity we saw this in our our X 480 our X 480 4 gigabyte vs. 8 gigabyte test and that test shows that yeah the averages can be pretty close sometimes maybe worst case they're a couple percent difference but in some games like Assassin's Creed or black ops or Mirror's Edge occasionally we'll see such bad low frame rates the 0.1% value that it really it might be like 6 FPS or 20 FPS as opposed to the 8 gigabyte card doing a double value to that or 60% higher value to that and and that is where you would really clearly see an impact in gameplay and where we as a review outlet would make the recommendation to buy the one that has a more stable frame output or more reliable repeatable frame output than just an average so the average values don't tell the whole story if you see a high average value on a product you really need to look at the low values as well to determine if it's actually any good for what you're doing because just a high average averages will by nature of an average collect all the data divide it and that can kind of smooth over any imperfections that as a user would be perceptible but as a metric might not be and then if you're looking at frame times in milliseconds and we show this for ashes of a singularity now frame times the thing to pay attention to is once there's more than an 8 millisecond swing between one frame to the next and frame time values that begins to become perceivable so if you have 16 milliseconds to 20 milliseconds really not super noticeable in fluidity of the the sort of frame rate output but when you have 8 milliseconds to 24 it's starting to become noticeable or sorry 16 milliseconds to 24 8 milliseconds 24 definitely is noticeable but that's that's your value you're looking at 8 milliseconds swing to kind of become perceptible to the human eye on average and that's a number we've gotten from talking to GPU manufacturers so that's the basics if you want to learn more about this I've written about it in the past but the best article in the industry is by scott watson and there's there's no reason to kind of try and push all that info out in a video so if you if you really want to go deep on this I believe the article is called inside the second that's that's the article name couple pages long and it explains what all this stuff is we've taken that core concept over the last few years and refined it into something that I think for our audience is easier to to read and understand and that's by converting the sort of frame rate versus time chart where you see this spiky output that tech report and a couple other sites will do we take that chart and we instead convert it into what we call one-percent lows and point one percent lows and then we put it out and have in a normal bar graph against the average of yes that makes a little bit easier to kind of comprehend what's exactly going on so hopefully that answers the question we will be pointing everyone to this video in the future when the question in counts is asked what is 1% lows that that's your answer so as always thank you for watching check out the channel subscribe to get more information and patreon link the postal video if you wanna help out directly I'll see you all next time you you