Synthetic Benchmarks
Kicking things off are our series of synthetic benchmarks that gives us an idea of where the cards should perform best. We start off with the greatest hits.
3DMark06
We start off with Futuremark’s 3DMark06 as our warm up benchmark. While it is an older benchmark, it sets the tone for how DirectX9 tests should pan out and is still relevant as some new games still use it. GTS 450 out of the gate is clobbering the HD 5770 and then completely embarrasses it once overclocked. Remember, our HD 5770 is already overclocked by a few MHz so that’s very impressive. The gap between it and the HD 5830 and GTX 460 is still fairly wide as expected.
3Dmark Vantage
Futuremark’s 3DMarkVantage is another standard when it comes to synthetic benchmarks. Representing DirectX 10, the benchmark gives us a rough idea of how things will play out in more modern games. HD 5770 pulls it back in DirectX 10 a bit, but it’s overall score still mirrors the whooping it received in 3DMark06. It’ll be interesting to see where the extra GPU horsepower will come into play for HD 5770.
Cinebench 11.5
Cinebench is a favourite for CPU and memory tests, but it does house an OpenGL test component. While few games these days use OpenGL, some folks out there may be using OpenGL apps and knowing how the cards perform may be important information. It would seem that ATI’s strong workstation background with OpenGL has carried into the Radeon HD lineage as the HD 5770 and HD 5830 clearly command this benchmark.
What’s most interesting though is how GTS 450 and GTX 460 score similarly at stock clocks under OpenGL. Overclocking does seem to make a difference, but none of the nVidia cards can match the AMD/ATI offerings.
Heaven Demo 2.1
Even if it wasn’t a benchmark, Heaven Demo 2.1 would just be great to look at all day long. The rendered world is just breathtaking and shows the potential performance of each GPU from OpenGL through to DirectX 11. It’s a little surprising to see that OpenGL performance didn’t reflect what we saw in Cinebench as both AMD cards falter against nVidia. However, DirectX 9 and 10 performance are much stronger than as shown in both Futuremark benchmarks. We’ll have to see what happens in the real game engine benchmarks coming up next.