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.

The benchmark line-up today will be slightly cut down; we've removed CINEBENCH, Darkest of Days along with the PhysX runs of both Batman AA and Dark Void. No PhysX runs of those two games are included.

Wireless Security Auditor and BADABOOM have also been dropped. Temperature, Power Draw and Noise Levels are still all included.

Now all we need to do is figure out which is the better card to buy: the HD 5830 which hasn't done well for ATI since launch or the newly released GTX 460? Maybe the HD 5830 didn't do well because there was nothing to go against it. Today we've got some competition; some very tough competition.

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.

Straight away we see the GTX 460 768MB Cyclone from MSI pull out the win thanks to PhysX being supported in the default run of 3DMark Vantage. We don't place a huge emphasis on Vantage which is why we run it first; what's important is what's going on in the real world games.