Palit Radeon 4870 X2 CrossFire Video 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 4870 X2 gets beat by the GeForce GTX 260 SLI setup, but lays down the law in CrossFireX! Keep in mind that these tests were done in Extreme mode, so the Radeon HD 4870 X2 scored X12052 3dmarks! Very impressive scores for having the benchmark run in Extreme mode.

Test Results: The NVIDIA ForceWare 177.83 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.