99TH percentile in benchmarks

[Sleepwalker]

When a game is benchmarked and the avergae says blue is the 99th and red is 30ms, what does the 99th mean? After googling it it seems that alot of people have different opinions on what it means.

I assume it to be while the game is running 99% of the time this is the frame rate...and please correct if i am wrong. I am just trying to understand the benchmarking results a little better.

[tacoshy]

99th percetile means that your benchmark is better then 99% of all benchmarks witht eh same hardware.

[Sapph]

It really depends where it's used. In benchmark rating which rates you being in 99th percentile?
That means you're in Top 1% of that hardware bracket.

In frametime measurements, it's basically the point where all other frames took longer to render than it. Basically, maximum FPS.

[Sleepwalker]

I was trying to read the benchmark framerates for GPU on Tom's Hardware.

It claims that the RTX 2070 had a 99th percentile on ultra setting at 60FPS.

And that is had I believe 30MS at 40FPS.

And that is both with ray tracing enabled.

So am I to understand that the game stutters at around 40FPS and the rest of the time is should be 60??

[Hatman]

Originally posted by RedRingSoldier:

And that is had I believe 30MS at 40FPS.

...

So am I to understand that the game stutters at around 40FPS and the rest of the time is should be 60??

Not sure wich benchmark you mean but framtimes are measured against time in that context, not against FPS. And no, it doesn't mean it will stutter at 40 FPS. A game running at a constant 40 FPS will still be (relatively) smooth. But when you get a sudden drop or spike in FPS it can produce high frametimes for a moment. Wich you may or may not perceive as stutter.

[DeLucia]

The 99th percentile does mean what you are assuming. The 1% might show possible misleading outliers or to give an idea of any gameplay hitching.

- With fps, 99% of the time the fps might be >60fps. And perhaps 1% <40fps.

- Frame times are worked out differently. 1 second = 1000ms, divided by 60 (fps) gives ~16ms. So to achieve 60 fps the gpu needs to render each frame at ~16ms. And to get 30fps the gpu needs to render at ~32ms a frame. The longer the frame takes to render the less fps.
So it might be that 99% of the frametimes are <16ms and 1%> 25ms, and perhaps 0.1%>32ms.

https://www.gamersnexus.net/images/media/2018/games/ffxv-gpu/bench/ffxv-gpu-bench-1440p-medium.png

https://www.gamersnexus.net/images/media/2018/games/ffxv-gpu/bench/ffxv-1440p-medium-frametimes-1070ti-v64.png

https://www.gamersnexus.net/game-bench/3223-ffxv-gpu-benchmark-technical-graphics-analysis

Edit: I had a brief look at Tom's Hardware. It looks like they have mislabled 1% with 99th.
You can use their frametime graph to make sense of the fps.

[Sleepwalker]

Thanks everyone for the information. It really helped me to understand it better.