3DMark Vantage - A User Guide

3DMark Vantage (DirectX 10) - A quick user guide

It's that time of the year again, today FutureMark releases their latest installment in their 3DMark series, the 100% DX10 version 3DMark Vantage. As requirement for DirectX 10 you need to have Windows Vista installed and have a DX10 ready graphics card (preferably a very fast one).

We received the new benchmark software merely 24 hours to day meaning, we will only have a quick peek at the all new software. What we have for you is generic information, the download links from our file-servers and the 1st 3DMark Vantage results we made for you guys.

Hey, we even pulled out some hefty gear and enforced a Quad SLI session today.

3DMark Vantage is a gamers’ benchmark for the DX10 platform. Its primary purpose is to help gamers evaluate their system performance for gaming use, and through online services relate the tested system to other available hardware. This should provide true value to gamers by enabling them to make better purchasing decisions, and to compete against each other in system performance. There are three guiding principles to  follow in determining the benchmark test mix, architecture, content and scoring. These principles help the benchmark to serve its primary purpose:

• Prefer game-like content,
• Represent technology fairly and accurately, and
• Exercise technology with a view to the future.

3DMark Vantage focuses on the two areas most critical to gaming performance: the CPU and the GPU. With the emergence of multi-package and multi-core configurations on both the CPU and GPU side, the performance scale of these areas has widened, and the visual and game-play effects made possible by these configurations are accordingly wide-ranging. This makes covering the entire spectrum of 3D gaming a difficult task. 3DMark Vantage solves this problem in three ways:

1. Isolate GPU and CPU performance benchmarking into separate tests,
2. Cover several visual and game-play effects and techniques in four different tests, and
3. Introduce visual quality presets to scale the graphics test load up through the highest-end hardware.

To this end, 3DMark Vantage has two GPU tests, each with a different emphasis on various visual techniques, and two CPU tests, which cover the two most common CPU-side tasks: Physics Simulation and AI. It also has four visual quality presets (Entry, Performance, High, and Extreme) available in the Advanced and Professional versions, which increase the graphics load successively for even more visual quality. Each preset will produce a separate, official 3DMark Score, tagged with the preset in question.

The graphics tests will have four quality presets available: Entry, Performance, High and Extreme. Each preset specifies a certain setting for the rendering options listed in section 5.6. The graphics load increases significantly from the lowest to the highest preset. The Performance preset is targeted for mid-range hardware with 256 MB of graphics memory. The Entry preset is targeted for integrated and low-end hardware with 128 MB of graphics memory. The higher presets require 512 MB of graphics memory, and are targeted for high-end and multi-GPU systems.

Guru3D will test in all their graphics benchmarks at standard at Performance and Extreme. Next page please.