Nvidia releases their FrameView app for free game performance analysis

Game benchmarking is a difficult task, making the process of reviewing graphics cards and other PC hardware a challenging one. What games do we test, what scenes do we benchmark within those games, and what GPUs should we compare (X) graphics card with? There’s a lot of thought that goes into game testing, and that’s before we consider what tools to use while benchmarking. 

Nvidia has now thrown its hat into the ring with FrameView, a new performance analysis tool which aims to deliver both performance and power benchmarking capabilities, offering support for DirectX 9, 10, 11 and 12, OpenGL, Vulkan, and Universal Windows Platform (UWP) applications, enabling benchmarking for practically every game in the market. 

With this move, Nvidia is effectively offering the market its own flavour of PresentMon, an open source benchmarking utility which also acts as the basis of AMD’s OCAT tool. The difference with FrameView is Nvidia’s secret sauce, which adds power data into the mix to deliver power efficiency data, a factor which Nvidia believes will highlight one of the company’s key advantages over its competition. 

To get its efficiency data, Nvidia’s FrameView notes the reported power usage of your system’s graphics card to judge efficiency, creating what will be the first stumbling block for PC hardware enthusiasts. Self-reported statistics are difficult to trust, especially when a “faulty” GPU BIOS or a “flawed” GPU driver could cheat the system to report favourable efficiency results. Even so, the tool should give end users a good indication of how much more efficient their new graphics card is, provided they are comparing upgrading to a new GPU from the same brand. 
 
Regardless of what way you look at FrameView, it ultimately brings more users to PresentMon and incentivises the tool’s future development. This move will also give AMD plenty of reasons to continue working on OCAT, their competing performance analysis tool.