3DMark Vantage
And finally, we have 3DMark Vantage's overall index. I'm pleased to have games that will challenge the performance of a new graphics card today, so we don't have to rely on an educated guess about possible future usage models like 3DMark. However, I did collect some scores to see how the GPUs would fare, so here they are. Note that I used the "High" presets for the benchmark rather than "Extreme," which is what everyone else seems to be using. Somehow, I thought frame rates in the fives were low enough.

Since both camps have released new drivers that promise big performance boosts for 3DMark Vantage, we tested with almost all new drivers here. For the GeForce 8800 GTX and 9800 GX2, we used ForceWare 175.19 drivers. For the other GeForces, we used the new 177.39 drivers, complete with PhysX support. And for the Radeon HD 3870 and 2900 XT, we tested with Catalyst 8.6. Since the 3870 X2 seemed to crash in 3DMark with Cat 8.6, we stuck with the 8.5 revision for it.

I suppose the final graph there is the most dramatic. That's where Nvidia's support for GPU-accelerated physics, via the PhysX API used by 3DMark's "CPU" physics test, kicks in. Obviously, the GPU acceleration results in much higher scores than we see with CPU-only physics, which affects both the composite CPU score and the overall 3DMark score.

I'm certainly as impressed as anyone with Nvidia's port of the PhysX API to its CUDA GPU-computing platform, but I'm not sure that's, you know, entirely fair from a benchmarking point of view. 3DMark has become like the Cold War-era East German judge at the Olympics all of a sudden. The overall GPU score may be a better measure of these chips, and it puts the Radeon HD 4850 ahead of the GeForce 9800 GTX XXX.