I hate depth of field. Really hate it. I hate Metro 2033 with its DirectCompute-based depth of field filter.
It’s unnecessary for games to emulate camera flaws, and depth of field is a limitation of cameras. The human eye is able to focus everywhere, and free to do that. Depth of field does not allow to focus where the user wants to focus, so is just an annoyance, and worse, it costs FPS.
This chart is great. Thanks for showing it.
It shows something out of many video cards reviews: the 7970 frequently falls under 50, 40, and even 20 FPS. That ruins the user experience. Meanwhile is hard to tell the difference between 70 and 80 FPS, is easy to spot those moments on which the card falls under 20 FPS. It’s a show stopper, and utter annoyance to spend a lot of money on the most expensive cards and then see thos 20 FPS moments.
That’s why I prefer TechPowerup.com reviews. They show frame by frame benchmarks, and not just a meaningless FPS. TechPowerup.com is a floor over TomsHardware because of this.
Yet that way to show GPU performance is hard to understand for humans, so that data needs to be sorted, to make it easy understandable, like this figure shows:
Both charts show the same data, but the lower has the data sorted.
Here we see that card B has higher lags, and FPS, and Card A is more consistent even when it haves lower FPS.
It shows on how many frames Card B is worse that Card A, and is more intuitive and readable that the bar charts, who lose a lot of information.
Unfortunately, no web site offers this kind of analysis for GPUs, so there is a way to get an advantage over competition.