So, in the case of swapping in assets, you'll see huge spikes in frame times upwards of 150ms or more. Then you know that your slowdowns to 20-40 FPS are the result of that, as opposed to something else going on. If the frame times are consistent around a given number, then things are working as intended for your system, and you just have shitty performance.
With HardOCP's data, for example, you can't tell that at all. From the previous page:
http://i.imgur.com/okh8Xv8.png/IMG]
Looking at that chart, you think, "not too much going on, a bit of a slowdown there towards the end." That could be physics, it could be your PC running some background task, it could be all sorts of stuff. But then you look at the frametime data for the exact same sequence:
[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/VurndvA.png/IMG]
Obviously those huge spikes in frame time is when the card basically takes a shit and can barely render frames. It's taking nearly a quarter of a second to produce one frame at times. This is an obvious indication that there is either A) something going terribly wrong with the game engine and is out of your control, or B) your card is swapping in new assets.
Now that you have limited the variables, you can then turn down textures to see if that helps rather than playing around with a ton of settings.[/QUOTE]
Thanks for the run down.
I take it any mid-high end PC gamer can notice FPS differences, but few might encounter and notice frame-time differences. So the usefulness of this data comes down to the difference in those who notice it and want to remedy it and those who don't notice it or don't mind a bad frame-time within a high frame-rate, it seems.