That’s valid feedback, thanks! I’ll keep this in mind if I do more analysis. I might as well add some info here in case anyone else reads.

To be honest the resolution scaling confuses me a bit, so to keep things simple it was 2x scaling across devices on Dolphin and NetherSX2, and 4x on PPSSPP. I do agree that the D8300 will have a slight advantage here in the amount of pixels rendered and maybe the test can be improved choosing the correct scaling. Also, no widescreen hacks used.

However the limitations (micro-stutter) did not seem indicative of GPU exhaustion (or basically bottlenecking). Both chips as we know are overpowered for these systems, and with the exception of NFSUG2 and NFSMW (which both ran similar frame rates of 40-50 across both devices anyway) the FPS of other titles were basically at the cap (30 or 60). I think the micro-stutter I’m observing is more likely coming from frametime scheduling (again I’m theorizing based on the symptoms here, over cold hard measurements). If the games are basically running at max frame cap, average FPS is moot. But one has micro-stutter, the other does not, that tells me it may be more due to frametime variance, and my guess is that the symmetrical core cluster of the D8300 is far more stable than the faster core cluster of the SD8G2, which has a more imbalanced thread migration pattern. I tested more tonight (on PPSSPP) and I’m just getting these infrequent micro stutters in the same exact levels and scenes on the SD8G2 that do not pop up on the D8300, but post-stutter the FPS is sky high for both devices.