Performance - Ceteris Paribus

In this section, we'll be looking at sheer frames/second throughput, the stuff forum debates are made of. We care primarily about average framerates, since extremes (minimums and maximums) are rather pointless metric to solely concentrate on, at least in a meaningful way, and to be honest we'd like to handle them differently in the future. Also, as the second part of the page's title already indicated, we're using the same API for both the RV790 and Cypress in these tests, which means that the latter doesn't flex it's DX11 muscle yet:



Doing some quick and dirty math, Cypress ends up being about 50% faster than RV790 at stock clocks in these games. Slicing away the memory bandwidth advantage and the gap narrows down with AA&AF, sitting at a less comfortable 40%. There's an obvious outlier here though, in Dirt 2, which doesn't really stress Cypress significantly when in DX9 mode: the GPU can chew through the command buffer faster than the CPU can fill it, more often than not. At any rate, it's time to see if using DX11 on Cypress allows it to get nearer to the 2x performance expectations that many had (perhaps unreasonably).