Anand: PII vs. Q9550 vs. i7 crossfire, Phenom II = smoother

[Hornet331]

Intel guys come here and combat the AMD guys asking what is "Smooth or Smoothness" I consider smoothness to mean, While im playing "insert game" i see very little jerky moments where i can tell the frames are dropping below 30fps.. If your frames go from 60 to 9.... You notice... You also notice large fluxes from say 30 to 80.. To be honest the fact that Intel system CAN pull higher FPS sometimes hurts it... Going from 30 to 160 LOOKS different then going from say 30 to 60.. You're eye might not notice the difference in those number in real life situations but Monitors react differently. When your frames go from 60 to say 20.. Its Smoother. Now mind you this is not ALWAYS the case. Sometimes AMD drops just as many frames as the Intel Chips do. But i tend to notice far greater FPS Pits on my Intel systems... In my store we have our "Head to Head" center. We have a Q9550 Running along side a Phenom 9950. 8 times out of 10 people will pick my AMD system running the Same game.. On the SAME monitor. with the Same ram Ect. And the same thing i hear time and time again is "Monitor 2 just looks smoother!" Take it for what you will. But if the shoe fits.. This is coming from your Average user coming in and just Playing a game on 2 similar machines... Most of these users are not even aware that there are 2 different chip makers... All they care about is How many GB's the computer has :P When you take the Pepsi Challenge you cant get pissed when people pick Coke. Its also not about what chip is better on paper... a Corvette will get you to work... But when you hit the Pot holes wouldnt you rather have the Buick? :P

there where already many threads about that topic which came to similar ideas. When in fact the only thing that influences the "smoothness" factor is the difference between max/min fps, then there is a easy fix for the intel system -> limit max. fps or enable vsync.

If that hypothesis would turn out to be true, a intel rig would be sometimes even more smoother cause of the often higher min fps rate then a amd rig or the other way riudn if the amd rig has a higher min fps and the max fps is limited.

Imho its the "smoothness" debate is the same thing as the "they eye cant see more then 30fps" debate. It is based to much on the individual to make a general statment, just like people say they can see the difference between 60fps and 100fps. Maybe some individual can but the majority can't, its the same with audiophiles, play joeavarage a 192kbit/s encoded mp3 and a flac file on a highend headphones, they won't notice the difference, hell maybe they would even say the mp3 sounded better.

i agree, the guy you're quoting has nothing to do with this forum, this is not about who gets higher frame rates at what resolution, it's about:

Hey, this CPU gets 90fps average in this game, but goes all the way down to 30fps every now and then

While this CPU gets 75fps average, but only goes down to 55fps every now and then

someone wanted the definition of smoothness, there's your smoothness, the difference between lows and highs on many occasions, i mean really, who cares if you get 200fps if every 10 seconds it goes down to 1fps, i wouldn't want to play like that

well just like said above, there are often cases where the min fps is higher on the intel rig -> enable vsync, limit max. fps and you have the same smoothness as the amd rig, but your artificially limiting your gfx card of showing what power it has.