We would like to thank the following companies for supplying and supporting us with our test system hardware and equipment: Intel, ASRock, Kingston, Western Digital, Noctua and Thermaltake.

As we mentioned on the page before, we've got the GTX 480 doing graphics and PhysX, the GTX 480 doing graphics and the CPU doing PhysX and finally, the GTX 480 doing graphics and the GTX 465 doing PhysX.

We'll of course today be running a smaller set of benchmarks due to the fact we're only going to be running games that make use of PhysX, since games that don't won't resemble any performance difference.

The idea is that games will run faster when a separate card is used for PhysX due to those calculations being passed onto another card. All the GTX 480 has to do then is give us the high FPS count. The question is, though, does it really work like that and is there a performance increase that can justify spending the extra money on a separate card just to do PhysX?

Let's get started!

3DMark Vantage

Version and / or Patch Used: 1.0.1
Developer Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com
Product Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com/products/3dmarkvantage/
Buy It Here

3DMark Vantage is the new industry standard PC gaming performance benchmark from Futuremark, newly designed for Windows Vista and DirectX10. It includes two new graphics tests, two new CPU tests, several new feature tests, and support for the latest hardware.

3DMark Vantage is based on a completely new rendering engine, developed specifically to take full advantage of DirectX10, the new graphics API from Microsoft.

With a separate PhysX card we really see no change. With the CPU doing PhysX we can see performance falls back slightly. For people who want PhysX and are looking at a separate card, this isn't the most important test; but for bench markers it's worth noting that adding a card just for PhysX isn't going to do much for your 3DMark Vantage score.