Quote Originally Posted by BenchZowner View Post
You meant less CPU dependent, GPU bound/limited to be precise.
High resolution, high game details & AA/AF = nearly 100% GPU limited ( 99.5% of the stress is put on the VGA/s )
Well whatever you choose to call it :p

The point is, that as the effective load on the GPUs is reduced (i.e. as their percentage utilisation over the benchmark drops), the effect of microstutter is rapidly reduced. This makes sense to a certain degree; if the GPUs are waiting for information from the CPU, then they will start to sync their output with the output from the CPU. The CPU will always be expected to compete its frame-by-frame workload in regular intervals (or at least in smoothly varying intervals).

In the case I showed above, with an overclocked GTX480 SLI setup, even crysis at 1920*1200 with 8xAA is not completely GPU bound. The GPU utilisation is around 85-95%, and this helps reduce the microstutter index significantly (compared to the 2560 test, where GPU utilisation is near-100%). I will test even lower resolutions tonight, for a true CPU-bound scenario. I expect very little microstutter then (but who knows!).

My point was that dropping from ~100% GPU load down to even ~90% load makes a big difference to microstutter.