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3DMark Vantage is the follow-up to the highly successful 3DMark06. It uses exclusively DX10 so if you are running Windows XP, you can forget about running this benchmark. However, it presents us with a truly stressful test of any modern graphics card so we have decided to begin including it in our testing procedure.
The scores for the HD4870 are once again very, very impressive in this test with it holding strong all the way into the Extreme preset. However, as we can see it begins lagging slightly as resolution increases and the R770 core seems to begin reaching its limit.
Unreal Tournament III
With absolutely stunning graphics, this popular online FPS provides great visuals to go hand-in-hand with palm-sweating gameplay.
For these tests we set up a 15 minute Bot Match on the Serenity level and let it play though. All of the results were recorded with FRAPS.
The results in this game run somewhat contrary to what we have been seeing in the previous two synthetic benchmarks and this is understandable since 3DMark is only worth so much. One way or another, the HD4870 seems to hit into a bit of a processor bottleneck at lower resolution but comes back strong at and above 1600 X 1200.
Devil May Cry has long been a staple platformer on consoles but has found only moderate success with its PC ports. The 4th iteration of this series aims to buck this trend with stunning visuals and intuitve gameplay
In this benchmark we used the in-game benchmark tool while running FRAPS to measure an average and minimum framerate.
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Every time we start this game we are greeted with the Nvidia "The Way its Meant to be Played" logo which usually means the game should run like gangbusters on Nvidia hardware. Well, the HD4870 proved THAT wrong again and again with absolutely stunning framerates at every resolution.
Crysis is one of those games that comes along every now and then and totally humbles every graphics card on the market. While some people have pointed towards shoddy programming, it is undeniable that this game looks ridiculously good when played at higher settings.
For this test we recorded a custom timedemo on the Harbor level equaling about 20 minutes of game time through jungle, over water and in vehicles. All results were recorded with FRAPS over the course of the timedemo.
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It is very hard not to be impressed by the performance of the HD4870 since Crysis has been known to eat graphics cards alive. Well, this card gives Crysis the big old middle finger and goes about its job without nary a hitch. Let's see if it can continue this in DX10....
Do you hear the stunned silence? It seems that while the R770 cards do well in DX9, they are better able to stretch their legs versus the competition in DX10. AA comes without any difficulty which is really saying something in a DX10 environment.
Even though Prey may be a bit older game compared against many of the other ones we are testing, it still provides a workout of even the best graphics cards on the market. This time we have enabled its Graphics Boost feature (Gboost in the charts) and run through a custom timedemo.
The HD4870 seems to be chalking up a pretty good Greatest Hits collection for itself since its performance once again impressed in this game. Even though Prey is getting a bit long in the tooth, at higher resolutions it still seems to be pretty demanding even on the HD4870.
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
Enemy Territory: Quake wars is the latest iteration of the wildly popular Quake franchise from ID Software. While it was met with luke-warm reviews by both the media and the gaming community, it remains an extremely popular online game.
In this test we set up a 15 minute timedemo on the Refinery level while the framerates were recorded in-game.
It seems like ATI cards love this game and are really able to shine. If you are a fan of ET: QW, this seems to be the card you should be looking at.
This has quickly become one of the most popular games for the PC and with good reason. This is one of the few times I have experienced actual excitement when looking for a good area to record the timedemo. The graphics are amazing and at the same time quite demanding when you get into the higher resolutions.
For this test we recorded a 15 minute timedemo on the Crash multiplayer level and recorded framerates using FRAPS. The maximum in-game framerate was bumped to 999.
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We begin to see a trend emerging here with the HD4870 loving it when higher IQ settings are implemented. What will absolutely stun you is the fact that this card beats the GTX 280 in one of the tests. This is probably due to the high-clocked memory more than anything but it is still impressive.
Russian developer Akella has released a nifty little DX10 benchmark centered around their game PT Boats: Knights of the Sea. This benchmark traditionally favours Nvidia hardware but we will see how things go this time.
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Here we see that there is a bit of work left to be done by ATI when it comes to driver optimizations for this benchmark. The HD4870 nonetheless puts up a good fight until it is simply overwhelmed at higher resolutions.
This is one stunning game. World in Conflict has provided us with some of my most memorable gaming experiences since the first Homeworld game was released and it has not stopped wowing me. In its DX9 form it provides eye-popping visuals and pushes most modern GPUs to their limits. However, in DX10 mode this game will cause nearly every graphics card to beg for mercy.
For this test we used the in-game benchmarking tool.
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Even though this is an Nvidia-centric game we see the HD4870 more than holding its own here. It leaves the 9800 GTX behind in the dust and even manages to surpass the HD4850 b a good 20%.
Overall, heat was very much under control throughout testing and even through the most strenuous test we could put it through the temperatures never rose above 82C since the fan would immediately spin up. By spinning up we mean very fractionally increasing speed to a point where it was just above a whisper.
That being said, while the new Nvidia cards have the acoustical profile of a freight train coming straight at you, this card is dead silent. To tell you the truth, at first it looked to us like the HD4870 was equipped with that dreaded piece of acoustical engineering which was the fan on the HD2900XT. Luckily, this card proved again and again that it could stay extremely quiet even under sustained loads of over an hour.
Power Consumption
For this test we hooked up our power supply to a UPM power meter that will log the power consumption of the whole system twice every second. In order to stress the GPU as much as possible we once again use the Batch Render test in 3DMark06 and let it run for 30 minutes to determine the peak power consumption while letting the card sit at a stable Windows desktop for 30 minutes to determine the peak idle power consumption.
Please note that after extensive testing, we have found that simply plugging in a power meter to a wall outlet or UPS will NOT give you accurate power consumption numbers due to slight changes in the input voltage. Thus we use a Tripp-Lite 1800W line conditioner between the 120V outlet and the power meter.
Power consumption proved to be a bit of a mixed bag since for the performance we are getting, the system draw is not that bad at all. However, we were hoping for a bit less wattage being used when the card is at idle. As we have seen in the past, the GTX 280 has a very good clock speed and voltage controller with which it can get some amazingly low idle power figures. We were hoping that ATI’s PowerPlay would achieve the same thing but at this point it seems to be poorly implemented or not working at all. We hope that this situation can be rectified in the near future with a driver release.
