XFX 280GTX XXX Edition

 

PhysX FluidMark is a physics benchmark based on NVIDIA PhysX engine. This benchmark performs a fluid simulation by imitating the rendering of lava. Real physics parameters such as viscosity are used. SPH (Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics) algorithm is enabled to increase the realism of the simulation.

 

 

At the time of the review, the ATI 4870×2 did not have PhysX drivers available although this will soon be rectified with the Havoc PhysX drivers rumoured to be in production for ATI based cards.

 

 

 

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.

 

  

As you can see, PhysX adds as much as 15% to the overall score of the GTX XXX. This however, is still 5% slower than the ATI 4870×2 which is currently the ‘benchmark’ for other cards in today’s market. Interestingly, Physx seemed to have less of an impact the higher the resolution when one would expect the opposite.

 

Lets take a look at some of the standard benchmarks to see how the GTX XXX fairs.

 

 

 

3DMark® 06 is a popular synthetic gaming benchmark used by many gamers and overclockers to gauge the performance of their PC’s taking advantage of today’s multi CPU and GPU performance. All 3DMark runs were performed a total of 5 times with the highest and lowest results being removed and an average calculated from the remaining 3 results.

 

 

It is plainly obvious that with the XFX GTX280 XXX card clocked much higher than stock, the scores follow suit with the XFX card almost matching the 4870×2. Considering the X2 has two cores, this is an astounding effort from the single GPU based XFX GTX280 XXX. The higher the resolutions went, the closer the scores got and one would assume the trend would continue with the GTX280 possibly overtaking the 4870×2 at higher resolutions. Sadly, the stock GTX280 fell away from the running as the resolutions increased.