High Performance Gaming on a Budget: Athlon II vs. Phenom II vs. Q9550S

Vantage

Vantage is Futuremark’s latest test. It is really useful for tracking changes in a single system – especially driver changes. There are two mini-game tests, Jane Nash and Calico and also two CPU tests, but we are still focusing on the graphics performance.

Here is a scene from Vantage’s second mini-game.

Let’s go right to the graphs and first check the Basic Tests with the default benchmark scores:

Now with the GTX 280:

We see more scores. Now let’s look at the mini-game frame rates, first with the HD 4870-X2:

Now the mini game framerates with our GTX 280:

We see the framerates are very close with our single-GPU, GTX280 and all 3 of our CPUs. Paired with the HD 4870-X2, the Athlon II 250 gets the biggest FPS boost from overclocking.  Enough of the synthetics as we move on to PC games and real world situations!