Vantage panned for lack of DX10.1

30 Apr 2008 | 10:33 BST

By Wily Ferret

WITH THE LATEST 3D Mark now having been on virtual shelves for a day or so, the initial verdicts are rolling in on both the software itself and the graphics cards it tries to hard to accurately rank.

For those who want a comprehensive comparison of exactly how every card ranks up, there are a number of sites that have done just that for you. Hardspell has a feature with 22 GPUs and 32 CPUs in various combos, whilst Expreview manages to rank up 16 GPUs against each other.

The verdict appears universal: the 9800 GX2 is the fastest card, with the 3870 X2 not far behind.

Meanwhile, one question is on everybody's lips: why no DX10.1 features? Given that the latest 3D Mark is supposed to rank cards according to how they will perform in games titles in the future, surely incorporating the latest DirectX extensions would have made sense? Futuremark reps have commented on the situation, saying that they didn't have enough time with the extended API to be able to incorporate it - but we do find that a little hard to believe, especially given the cosy relationship the firm has in the Vole's hole (producing the gaming performance test for Vista, amongst other things). Readers are invited to draw their own conclusions about the winners and losers of DX10.1 inclusion or otherwise.

Rather than the anti-canned-benchmark sentiment of a year or so ago, when driver 'tweaking' was all the rage at GPU HQ, it seems that hardware websites are luke-warm about incorporating the latest software. Anandtech says that "We'll include it in some of our reviews as a baseline measurement", Legit Reviews proffers that "We plan to incorporate 3DMark Vantage into future articles", Hot Hardware parrots the exact same line, whilst PC Perspective is more enthusiastic, saying that "The addition of the 3DMark Vantage software into our collection of benchmarking tools is a welcome one".

Whatever happened to keeping it real? µ

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