Legit Reviews

3DMark Vantage is the new industry standard PC gaming performance benchmark from Futuremark, newly designed for Windows Vista and DirectX10. It includes two new graphics tests, two new CPU tests, several new feature tests, and support for the latest hardware. 3DMark Vantage is based on a completely new rendering engine, developed specifically to take full advantage of DirectX10, the new graphics API from Microsoft.

Testing was run with the 'Performance' preset shown above at 1280x1024, as well as the more demanding 1920 x 1080, 'High' preset.

In 3DMark Vantage, the AXLE GT 240 takes the lead by a margin of 4% on the Performance preset, and 13% on the High preset over the 9600 GSO which leads me to believe that the GT215 core was designed more for physics and DirectX 10 looking back at the DirectX 9 games where the 9600 GSO leads. But let's keep going with the rest of the tests before making any conclusions

In the Overall scores, the AXLE GT 240 keeps its lead over the 9600 GSO with the same difference of 13% on High, and 4% on the Performance preset. You can see the HD 4670 trails pretty heavily on the overall score; that is because it has to offload the physics work to the CPU, which is a solid chunk of the overall score. CPU scores are actually separated by a staggering 478% between the AXLE GT 240 (CPU: 23,424) and the HD 4670 (CPU: 4,899) due to physics, for those wondering.

With the main performance tests behind us, let's take a look at how efficient the core revision actually is.