HD4870 512MB - MSI R4870 and R4870 OC review

Page 12 - Performance: 3DMark Vantage

3DMark has established itself as "benchmark number one" for determining the gaming performance of any given computer. This in great extent is very wrong, because due to its popularity, AMD and NVIDIA optimize the drivers of their videocards way too much in favour of 3DMark, making it inadequate for any relevant determination of of the ingame performance of the card, where it is not that well optimized. A good example for this is the fact that the gaming solutions of both NVIDIA and AMD including two graphical cores (SLI/Crossfire) for example can get increase of around 60-70% in 3DMark, while in most games at times they couldn't get even 20% increase.

3DMark Vantage on the other hand is the last from the series and unlike any other game or benchmark is written exclusively for DirectX 10. For the time being in order to preserve compatibility with older computers, all the games actually use the DirectX 9 framework and have additional layer of DirectX 10 effects. For Vantage you need Windows Vistа (with SP1, adding DirectX 10.1 support and ShaderModel 4.1), but the test is one of the most interesting ones, if not for the fact that it tests the capabilities of newest video chips, then because Futuremark (the company that created it) is soon to release the first game based on the 3DMark Vantage core.

So here are the results:

In the first place besides the enormous results in favour of NVIDIA GeForce 280GTX 1GB, we see that the crippled GT200 core that powers 260GTX 896MB is much slower than the one of the top NVIDIA model, thus MSI R4870/R4870-OC get to pull ahead. The test also demonstrates (with the aid of HD3870X2) how well it's optimized to use multiple cores. Futuremark made sure that according to their results it would seem that spending money on second card for SLI or Crossfire mode (or dual cored card such as HD3870X2 (in essence being two cores connected in Crossfire on a single board) for that matter) is the wise choice.