Performance - 3DMark06 | Vantage

3DMark 06 CPU test

Well, everybody loves 3DMark06, and nowadays, it's CPU limited, making it an okay application to check CPU performance. The scores that you see obviously are the CPU test itself, not overall 3DMark06 scores.

Overclocked at 4000 MHz, the Core i7 975 is pushing really hard... but let's check out the newest installment, 3DMark Vantage.

3DMark Vantage (DirectX 10)

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 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 512MB of graphics memory, and are targeted for high-end and multi-GPU systems.

The 3DMark Vantage P Score

Some hate it, some love it, here are the 3DMark Vantage score results. We start off with the standard test run, above you can observe the P (performance) score. The results are all done with a BFG GeForce GTX 280 OC graphics card, and it's clear that the P score is very CPU bound, let's verify that by overclocking.

Yep, once we start to overclock, we can add ~200 points to the score.

3DMark Vantage also has a standalone CPU test. It's very multi-core and multi-threading aware, so it was no surprise to see the Core i7 kick in real hard.

Once we start to overclock the processor, we see a majestic jump in overall CPU performance. But let's check out some games.