3DMark Vantage has been released at April 28, bringing us a totally new way of gaming benchmark. In a gamer/reviewer’s view, the Vantage release is as important as a hardware company like AMD or Intel launch their new product lines. The software is not just make for bench current GPU, it is make for benching PC gaming hardware in the future. Our rig is not that future, so in our test you can see, even a GeForce 9800GX2 performs not so good in the most extreme setting of Vantage.
Before Vantage’s launch, NVIDIA has already prepared a new driver, 175.12, and AMD released a Hotfix for Catalyst 8.4 after the benchmark tool’s launch. It seems a competition base on 3DMark Vantage have already begin.

But 3DMark Vantage is not polished, some bugs have shown their signs in the software, still waiting for FutureMark to eliminate them. in the official FAQ there is some early answers. If you have troubles with 3DMark Vantage, you should check out the FAQ.
Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: Testing platform
Page 3: 16 cards benchmark with Performance preset
Page 4: 16 cards benchmark with Extreme preset
Page 5: Card comparison
Page 6: 3DMark Vantage is torture for GFX cards
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3DMark Vantage of course will have a trail version for us, but FutureMark is going to release another three different paid versions of 3DMark Vantage:
The basic 3DMark Vantage (Basic Edition is what they called) will be only 6.95USD, it will be licensed for non-commercial and personal use only, functions include unlimited number of test runs using a single Preset setting, network connection required to view results. (It seems FuturMark really want to bind 3DMark users to their ORB.)
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NVIDIA plans a driver (175.12) release at 3DMark Vantage launch day, but it is leaked earlier. The inf file contains almost all GeForce product, but reveals no new product this time. For now it is only 175.12 for WinVista 64-bit, NVIDIA will release 32bit version later in here.
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Click to the original pic
Guys at Xfastest have already got their hands on with 3DMark Vantage. Let’s see their platforms and scores:
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Massages from our source, NVIDIA is going to release a new driver for 3DMark Vantage. The driver is 175.xx, will be release at 3DMark Vantage’s launch day. With the new driver, NVIDIA’s Flagship card, the 9800GX2 can score nearly 10K with 3DMark Vantage Performance Perset.
3DMark Vantage have several Presets, ranged from entry, performance, high and extreme. It will choose the most suitable Preset for current cards automatically. For more information about the Presets you can read these leak documents.

We have been talking about 3DMark Vantage from FutureMark for a long time. The latest word from the company said 3DMark Vantage will be announce in April 28.
The new 3DMark Vantage is a 100% DirectX10 application, works with Vista only. But FYI, at first they scheduled to release the application at GDC this year but failed to launch. Hope this time they can make it.
With the release date, source also mentions the application requirement:
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Process Monitor is an advanced monitoring tool for Windows that shows real-time file system, Registry and process/thread activity. It combines the features of two legacy Sysinternals utilities, Filemon and Regmon, and adds an extensive list of enhancements including rich and non-destructive filtering, comprehensive event properties such session IDs and user names, reliable process information, full thread stacks with integrated symbol support for each operation, simultaneous logging to a file, and much more.
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3Dmark Vantage documents leaked, score methodology revealed
Here is some screenshot of 3Dmark Vantage RC1 release note. click on the pics to enlarge.

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Click on pic to enlarge. This is custom mode score, 1680×1050, no AA/AF. 169.25 WHQL.
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a decent card without RPM reading
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These “screenshots” are captured by digital camera. It seems the RC0 version of 3Dmark is not stable, because it can’t even finish the benchmark and reporting errors.
source said his testbed can not finish Graphic Test 2, and all the graphic test/CPU test/feature test can not be ran one right after another or it will crash. The application still have lots to improve.
Just for your information, 3Dmark Vantage is a Vista/DirectX10-only benchmark program and scheduled to be released at GDC on Wednesday the 20th of February 2008. Source said there both release note and spec did not mention DirectX10.1.

The “about” screen. The GUI is different from previous version.
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Both of them are perfect tools for CPU benching and stability test. HyperPi is superPi’s front end program while wPrime uses CPU-Z’s some features.
wPrime 1.6 direct download
wPrime offical website
HpyerPi 0.99b direct download
HyperPi official website