ECS GeForce 9800 GTX+ Hydra SLI Video Card Kit

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.

Test Results: Running 3DMark Vantage with Extreme settings is very tough on graphics cards as you can see the ECS GeForce 9800 GTX+ Hydra kit fell down the chart when compared to the 3DMark06 results. According to 3DMark Vantage the pair of 9800 GTX’s in SLI were on the same performance level as the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 that just came out in recent months.

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 cards do so much better than the ATI Radeon cards in this benchmark. All of the Radeon card have roughly the same CPU score since the CPU is doing the work and not the GPU on the graphics cards. The ECS GeForce 9800 GTX+ Hydra kit did well, but fell behind both the 192 and 216-core Geforce GTX 260.