It was just recently that Futuremark launched its latest version of its flagship benchmark, 3DMark. One difference with the 2008 version is that the company opted for a new name, Vantage. This "gaming" oriented benchmark mainly adds support of DirectX 10 and is therefore exclusively destined for Windows Vista when used with a GPU compatible with the new API. It’s available for download here.
The benchmark offers two GPU and two CPU tests as wells as six smaller ones specific to the fillrate, shaders, particles etc. We won’t go too far into details concerning these tests because there wasn’t really any new rendering technology added. Instead this new version uses the new API with heavily loaded scenes.
The first GPU test, Jane Nash, is far from being visually impressive even if there is indeed a significant graphic load. From an artistic point of view, we found it uninteresting and even if the main purpose is to measure performances we could expect more from Futuremark in this area.
The second test is much better and represents a scene in outer space. While in spite of everything images don't impress, the load corresponds more to what is actually displayed than in the first test.
The first CPU test involves artificial intelligence while the second deals with physics.
The second test consists of an independent world (corresponding to a gate and two airplanes) attributable to each available CPU core. In other words, performances will be perfectly proportional depending on the number of cores. It also supports the PhysX accelerator. When in use, one of the CPU cores controls this accelerator and the tasks that it is unable to process as well as taking on the processing of 4 worlds in cooperation with the PPU. With a quadcore CPU, there will therefore be 4 worlds. With a quad core CPU + PhysX accelerator, there will be seven.
Many particles are displayed, which means an entry level GPU can have a slight influence on performances as their display is a bit resource heavy.
