ATI HD 4890 1GB CrossFire - AMD Phenom II 955 BE vs Intel Core i7 920

Page 2 - 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 video cards way too much in favour of 3DMark, making it inadequate for any relevant determination of the in game 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 50% in 3DMark, while in most games at times they couldn't get even 30% increase. Of course nowadays most of the developers do optimize themselves their products to use more effectively multiple cores and threads.

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.

Hera are the results, sorted by GPU performance:

Results are not surprising at all, while interesting nevertheless. 3DMark is specialized benchmark an as such is totally optimized for multithreading, thus utilizing the 8 logical cores of Core i7 920 to their absolute 100% maximum. Thus it would be understandable if in heavier modes the benchmark does favor the Intel, that however is NOT quite so. In the end difference in results between the Intel and AMD platforms in the graphics tests (the points which are based on the frames per second) are almost equal. Also its easily noted that the percent of performance increase in 1x HD 4890 vs 2x HD 4890 is considerably raised in the heavier mode. That is clearly visible in most games later too - the more higher resolution, detail level and AA/AF you add, the more you'll gain from configuration with more than one video controller. As for 3DMark Vantage results - they are just points. They have no meaning for us. We hope you have some use of them. Now lets see the game already (: