Synthetic Benchmarks: 3DMark Vantage
To start, let's have a look at 3DMark Vantage and see what general performance indications we can get from this synthetic benchmark. Before we dig into this one, we would like to make it clear that the Nvidia-specific PhysX optimizations were turned off for our runs here. This is because we have found that it gives Nvidia cards an unrealistic advantage that is only applicable in a handful of titles available. Perhaps that will change, as the company is announcing increasingly significant partnerships with game developers. But for the time being, those performance results are unrepresentative of the titles available.
As you can see, the performance of the Radeon HD 4830 and GeForce 8800 GT seem to be very close. CrossFire and SLI performance are fairly similar to a single Radeon HD 4870 X2 card at the low-resolution Performance setting, but as resolution and detail are raised to the Extreme preset, the 4830 CrossFire and 8800 GT SLI configurations fall quite a bit behind.
3DMark can, at best, provide us with a general idea as to how graphics cards will perform in the real world. Our 3DMark bench seems to indicate that the Radeon HD 4830 and GeForce 8800 GT deliver very competitive results, even when run in multiple-card configurations. Armed with this expectation, let’s move on to the real-world benchmarks.
