In February we wrote: Micro stuttering may destroy the performance gains from current multi GPU technologies. Since the beginning of the year hardware forums all over the world discussed what it's all about the infamous micro stuttering. People called for a "Frametime Harmonizer”, a device that emits the frames of multiple GPUs at regular intervals. The drivers were said to fix the problem. Many people expected a hardware solution with the Radeon HD 4870 X2. But the problem was not fixed (properly).

After having explained the problem in the X2 review, we now deliver the appropriate pictures. The data below was gathered with the same card, which we unfortunately had to send back already. The Catalyst driver is the very same, too. It is a Beta state piece of software with the internal serial number is 8.52 (Catalyst 8.7: v8.512). To keep the data flowing we used a Core 2 Duo E8500 at 3.6 GHz (400 x 9).

The frametimes below are taken from Half-Life 2: Episode 2, which we upgraded with the Fakefactory Cinematic Mod 8. In order to receive low framerates, we activated 24x CFAA (8x MSAA plus CFAA and Edge Detection) and 16:1 AF. The charts show the first thirty frames (not seconds!), that we recorded with Fraps. As it turned out that the tool doesn't always record what is displayed on the monitor, we convinced ourselves that the stuttering was there, before we let Fraps do the monitoring and got these results.

You can read the entire article at PCGH.