EVGA GeForce GTX 470 Hydro Copper FTW Video Card Review

Futuremark 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.

Ever since Futuremark 3DMark Vantage has come out, there has been a debate about the proper way to run 3DMark Vantage with respect to NVIDIA graphics cards. I will admit that I am torn in the debate and see both sides of the argument. With that being said, I couldn’t decide which way to benchmark so I ran 3DMark Vantage both ways. We ran 3DMark Vantage with the performance preset. The EVGA GeForce GTX 470 Hydro Copper FTW and the Galaxy GeForce GTX 465 were both run with PhysX left on auto-select as well as being limited to the CPU.

Benchmark Results: When we left the PhysX on auto-select in the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 Hydro Copper FTW had an overall score that was nearly 1500 3DMarks or 8.2% higher than the HIS Radeon HD 5870. When we limited the PhysX to the CPU the EVGA GeForce GTX 470 was 8.5% behind the HIS Radeon HD 5870’s overall score. In both runs of 3DMark Vantage the GPU score of the EVGA GeForce GTX 470 was ~11% behind the HIS Radeon HD 5870.