Anything that simplifies the arcane process of benchmarking and PC analytics is, generally, a good thing. So it’s nice to know that in the near future, everyone will be able to download a simplified benchmarking tool from Nvidia that works on AMD and Nvidia graphics cards.
Update 10/07/19: FrameView has now been released to the public, and you can download it for free here without any logins or middleware software. Some shots of the program’s interface, and how it logs data, can be seen below.
Called FrameView, the tool is basically a piece of software that Nvidia described as a software version of their frametime capture tool, FCAT.
Now there’s plenty of software benchmarking tools out there. FRAPS has been a standard for a long time, and there’s been lots of alternatives introduced to accommodate DirectX 12 and Vulkan games, like PresentMon or AMD’s OCAT (Open Capture and Analytics), the latter of which was updated only just last week.
Not all of these tools have great interfaces or work with the same amount of reliability, and in some cases the information spat out can be indecipherable to novices. FrameView offers a pretty straightforward view: it’ll display an overlay with the average frame rate, as well as frame rates for the 90th percentile, 95th percentile and 99th percentile, as well as power used per watt and the amount of dropped frames.
The big advantage here is that FrameView has integrated power management, something FRAPS/OCAT and other software tools don’t do. All of this can be logged in real-time (although the beta software won’t display the overlay while logging), and Nvidia stresses that there’s no noticeable performance impact or difference by using FrameView compared to the supremely expensive, hardware-based FCAP solution.
One kicker is that FrameView won’t be able to report the amount of power used by AMD boards, because of differences in how those APIs work. But all other functions, including logging for rendered and displayed FPS, should work just fine.
FrameView works with DX12, Vulkan, DX11 and older APIs, although the pre-logging overlay currently only functions in DX11 and DX12 games. Jeff Yen, Nvidia’s technical marketing director, said that Nvidia is working on making the overlays visible during the logging process as well.
A beta version of FrameView has been released to the press, with Nvidia still determining how they’ll distribute the program more broadly. I asked whether it would be released on Steam (like other benchmarking/overclocking tools have been), although at this stage it’s likely that it’ll be a separate download on the GeForce website.
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