3DMark gurus splurge early
28 Apr 2008 | 09:52 BST
What difference does a few hours make?
THOSE HOPING TO GET a sneak peek at the heavy-weight match up of the week - 3870 X2 v 9800 GX2 in 3DMark Vantage - are in luck, as early screen shots from the benchmarking software have hit the Wibble showing just that combo.
Vantage, the latest in the 3DMark series of benchmarks to come out of Futuremark in Scandinavia, is due for release later on today - which means that 'testers' have had their hands on code for a while now. It seems that one or two just couldn't keep a lid on their excitement and had to post up the results.
In the benchmark, it appears that the Radeon 3870 X2 scores 8259, whilst the Geforce 9800 GX2 knocks 11308 out of the park - a substantial win. The base system for both was a Core 2 Extreme QX9770 running in an Asus P5E3, using the X48 chipset.
A quick and dirty analysis of the screenshots shows that the Geforce has the edge in 'Feature Test 1', which appears to text throughput, with the GX2 scoring 1287 GTexels/s to the Radeon's apparently paltry 780. The Geforce also wins big in 'Feature Test 3', scoring 25FPS to the Radeon's 3. Driver bug or genuine performance delta?
Nobody will know until the world at large has had a chance to dissect the log files, no doubt accompanied by oodles of spin from both the green and red+green camps.
Look out for Vantage to hit virtual shelves this afternoon here, check out the screen shots for yourself here, and wait for the inevitable deluge of web-wide hardware Wibbling on the topic by this evening. µ
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