3DMark Vantage measures Shader 4.0 (i.e., DirectX 10) performance and supports PhysX, a programming interface developed by Ageia (now part of NVIDIA) to transfer physics calculations from the system CPU to the video card GPU in order to increase performance. Mechanical physics is the basis for calculations about the interaction of objects. For example, if you shoot, what exactly will happen to the object when the bullet hits it? Will it break? Will it move? Will the bullet bounce back? Note that since we are considering only the GPU score provided by this program, physics calculations are not taken into account.
We ran this program at three 16:10 widescreen resolutions, 1680×1050, 1920×1200, and 2560×1600. First we used the “Performance” profile, and then we used the “Extreme” profile (basically enabling anti-aliasing at 4x, anisotropic filtering at 16x, and putting all detail settings at their maximum or “extreme” values). The results being compared are the “GPU Scores” achieved by each video card.
It is fairly accepted that a fan at the rear of the case improves the CPU cooling. In this review, we will test different situations to determine how much a rear case fan can cool down your processor.
Let’s take a look at the highest-end CPU from AMD that is being released today, the FX-8350 (4 GHz), and compare it to its main competitor, the Core i5-3470 (3.2 GHz). We also included the Core i5-2500K (3.3 GHz), the FX-8150 (3.6 GHz), and the Phenom II X6 1100T (3.3 GHz) in the comparison.
The Virtu Universal MVP allows you to combine the processing power of an Intel integrated graphics processor to your video card, in order to increase performance. Let’s see if it really works.