3DMark Vantage

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.