Core i7 vs. Penryn vs. Phenom II with HD 4870-X2 & TriFire
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:
Again we note a nice advantage for Core i7 but they are really just meaningless numbers. We see the CPUs line up perfectly as they scale according to clockspeed and amount of cores and refinements. So now let’s look at the mini-game framerates with our HD 4870-X2 and Tri-Fire configurations.
We note the frame rates with all five of our CPUs. Again they line up almost too predictably with core speed, number of cores and architectural refinements. Enough of the synthetics as we move on to PC games and to real world situations!
Nice thorough testing. I think you should consider adding some GTA4 benchmarks to either this or future testing.
Thank-you. Perhaps in future I will add GTA4.
I have switched from Vista 64 to Win 7 64 and I am definitely adding a few new game benchmarks to my benchmarking suite after I am done with my CES articles. The only one that is certain AtM is L4D to replace Lost Coast.
Oh yeh for your charts you also have the 720 listed for all the AMD processors, when I’m sure you meant to say the 550 and 955. I mean I was able to figure out which is which by the X2, X3, and X4, but others might not.
You’re right and thank-you for pointing it out. It is somewhat funny that we all missed it, if quite embarrassing to me.
As soon as I catch up with my other articles on CES and GF-100 Fermi, I will redo those charts. I had a lot of trouble with the site and HTML errors and after they were fixed, this article got really hurried up for publication so as to be published before I left for CES.
The Phenom II CPUs are always in the same order (as determined by X2, X3, and X4):
550-X2
720-X3
955-X4