There’s been talk over the years about frame skip / micro stutter in Windows 7 versus a smooth experience in XP. There’s a way that I found today where you measure micro stutter via frame time analysis.
Here’s a FRAPs Bench Viewer output of ggpofba frametimes over around 5mins of play on my Windows 7 machine:
http://img13.imageshack.us/img13/3306/oxf6.png
You can see that overall it’s very consistent however there are on occasion very large spikes once every minute which may or may not be noticeable while playing. I don’t have a way to run the same test but I suspect XP will be more stable and I’m curious if there’s any difference with other operating systems like Vista and 8. I’m wondering if you guys could post your results and setups so we can see what’s going on.
The test is easily performed using FRAPs and FRAPs Bench Viewer as follows:
Part 1 - Creating the benchmark data files:
Go to the Fraps FPS tab:
1. set up an output folder
2. set up a hotkey
3. Benchmark settings:
a. Frametimes = ON
b. others = don’t care
**Part 2 - Run the Test **
Navigate to your GGPO install directory and launch **ggpofba.exe**. Run a demo file by going to Game > Replay input or simply spectate a live GGPO game instead. Press the FRAPs hotkey to begin the benchmark. Press the hotkey again after around minutes of play to stop the benchmark.
Part 3 - Viewing the benchmark data files:
The files created by Fraps are "CSV" or "comma separated values," which can be easily opened in any spreadsheet program. Fraps Bench Viewer performs some basic analysis and visual presentation for ease of use.
To view a Fraps “* frametimes.csv” file in Fraps Bench Viewer, drag the file onto the open program window or onto the application icon.
After a few moments of processing, you will see a chart. You have a choice of three ways to view the data:
- Time, FPS or Rank. Time is what we’re interested in to see the Frame Time results.
**Part 4 -Take a screenshot of your chart and reply here. **
-dela
