The good news is that the problem with looking at pure minimums is a well-known fact, so clever statisticians have already had a solution for decades (or more): percentiles. Run it three times in a row and you'll typically find that the second and third runs show significantly higher "minimums." But even running the test multiple times doesn't fully account for variations between runs. Run the built-in benchmark once and the minimum frame rate might show as 25fps. If you were actually playing Shadow of Mordor rather than just benchmarking it, you might have stuttering frame rates right as a saved game loads, but then for minutes or even hours afterward the frame rates would be higher and generally consistent. Shadow of Mordor is like this, as the level assets are still loading for the first few seconds. In between these extremes, there are other games where the built-in benchmark may have erratic minimum FPS results during the first few seconds of a benchmark. If the 30fps result happened consistently, it might be meaningful, but if it only occurs during a camera/scene change and it only happens for one or two frames out of thousands, it has little bearing on normal game play. When this happens, there might be a single instance where the frame rate drops to 30fps. The test consists of 26 scenes, but frame rates are captured during scene transitions-so for example, the first few scenes may have all their assets loaded into memory, but at some point there's a scene that has to load some assets. The average frame rate is still a respectable 48fps, but the minimum frame rate indicates there's a serious problem somewhere.Īt the other end of the spectrum, the Unigine Heaven 4.0 benchmark has extremely unreliable minimum frame rates. The game would feel smooth for those 19 frames and then there would be a big stutter on the last frame. Or let's take an even more extreme case: imagine a game that renders at 60fps for 19 frames and then 10fps for a single frame. While the average frame rate would be 60fps, on a typical 60Hz display with VSYNC disabled you would see the first frame for three screen updates followed by one update showing parts of the three fast frames. Imagine, as a worst-case scenario, a game where one frame renders at 20fps and then the next three frames render at 180fps. The short summary is that minimum frame rates matter because they can cause a game to stutter. To understand why, we need to talk about why minimum FPS matters and then look at a few benchmarks as examples. All of these can be useful to varying degrees, but the inconsistency between benchmarks is a real concern. Some games appear to sweep a few low results under the table, others report the absolute minimum frame rate, and still others use a sort of "average minimum" value. The problem is that depending on built-in benchmarks and their reported frame rates isn't always reliable. Unlike average frame rates, usually expressed as FPS (frames per second), minimum frame rates are prone to some wild fluctuations between benchmark runs.
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