So you did your research and figured out which is the best graphics card for your setup, bought it, and installed it in your PC. Now what? Playing games is the natural thing to do at this point, and a new framerate capture tool from Nvidia will help you analyze performance to make sure your shiny new card is working as it should be.
It's called FrameView, and it is essentially a modified version of PresentMon, with some additional features Nvidia has added. For example, you can track power usage with FrameView. You can't do that in utilities like FRAPS and AMD's OCAT (Open Capture and Analytics), so it's a nifty perk.
The caveat is that even though FrameView works with both Nvidia and AMD cards, the power tracking feature spits out inaccurate results on AMD hardware.
"AMD’s GPU power consumption API reports a value in-between chip power and board power, rather than the true values. So you'll have to contact AMD and ask them to provide accurate results from their API," Nvidia says.
Otherwise, FrameView is designed so that you can collect real-time GPU performance and power data in games. Nvidia claims it offers a "higher degree of accuracy than many other tools and methods, making it the go-to app for benchmarking."
The data is broken up into two columns: rendered framerates on the left side and displayed framerates on the right side. The difference between the two is that the former measures and reports timestamps at the beginning of the pipeline and indicates smooth of animation delivered to the GPU, while the latter looks at the end of the pipeline and indicates what you actually see on screen.
What's also neat is that it presents 90th, 95th, and 99th percentile calculations. These measurements come in handy to determine if a minimum framerate is close to its average.
It's also worth noting that FrameView captures data from all major APIs and virtually all games, with support for DirectX 9-12, OpenGL, Vulkan, and Universal Windows Platform (UWP) application.
FrameView is currently in beta. If you want to give it a whirl, go here to grab it.
