XFX 9800GX2 Quad SLI

 
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.
 
 
Clearly the brute power of the 9800GX2’s have the upperhand here, they also scaled slightly better in Quad SLI. Sadly 3DMark Vantage returned a ‘0’ score for the 2560×1600 run on all cards even though the benchmark ran to its completion each time. This could be down to a number of reasons, driver errors, buffer overflow errors but I suspect its simply a bug in Vantage at this early stage in its development.
 
 
 
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 todays 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.
 
 
Here we see the opposite of Vantage with the 3870×2 winning out overall. Scaling here was a mixed bag with the 3870×2’s scaling well in both single and dual cards but the GX2 is the better once AA/AF is applied at high resolutions. So its pretty much neck and neck for the artificial benchmarks. Let’s move on to some real world gaming conditions….