Core i5 2500K and Core i7 2600K review - Performance - 3DMark 06 CPU | 3DMark Vantage CPU

3DMark 06 CPU test

3DMark06 nowadays is very CPU limited, making it a good application to check CPU performance. The scores that you see are the CPU test itself, not overall 3DMark06 scores. As you can see, it is a lot of of performance for a quad-core processor.

3DMark Vantage CPU test

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.

3DMark Vantage has a standalone CPU test. It's very multi-core and multi-threading aware, it was no surprise to see the Core i7 series kick in real hard, it's also a title that likes Hyper-Threading which favors Core i7 tremendously. We'll look at the overall P score in the game segment of this article as well.