ATI Radeon HD 4670 Graphics Card Review

3DMark Vantage

3DMark Vantage is the new industry standard PC gaming performance benchmark from Futuremark, newly designed for Windows Vista and DirectX10. It includes two new graphics tests, two new CPU tests, several new feature tests, and support for the latest hardware. 3DMark Vantage is based on a completely new rendering engine, developed specifically to take full advantage of DirectX10, the new graphics API from Microsoft.

The Extreme settings were used for testing, so a resolution of 1920×1200 was used.

It should be noted that the new GeForce 9800 GTX+ supports PhysX with an additional driver installation. With the NVIDIA PhysX driver v8.06.12 installed along with the Forceware 177.39 driver, the GeForce 9800 GTX, GTX 280 and GTX 260 video cards become physics processors. This new capability extends physics simulation beyond the limited capabilities of the CPU, enabling incredible performance scalability by leveraging the power of the graphics processor. Today you can test two applications to show off PhysX: 3DMark Vantage and Unreal Tournament 3. We tested just the GeForce 9800 GTX+ with the new Physics driver to show off what it means for performance.

Test Results: The Radeon HD 4670 does fairly well in this tough benchmark and loses to the GeForce 9600 GT, but knocks off the GeForce 9600 GSO and GeForce 9500 GT.

Test Results: The newer NVIDIA ForceWare graphics card drivers have PhysX enabled, so the CPU score in Vantage is off the charts since the work can be done on the GPU rather than the CPU. This is the reason that the GeForce 9500 GT does so much better than the ATI cards in this benchmark. Notice that the GeForce 9600 GSO beat the more expensive GeForce 9600 GT. This is because the GeForce 9600 GSO has 96 stream processors (shaders) versus the 64 stream processors on the GeForce 9600 GT. The GeForce 9600 GT is clocked higher, but it is clear that when it comes to stream computing that more shaders means more performance. This proves true when running applications like F@H on the GPU also as the GeForce 9600 GSO will bring in more points per day than the GeForce 9600 GT.