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

The GTX 480 is already a very fast card; we know that. It's the fastest single GPU video card on the market at the moment. We have a lot of faith in what MSI can offer us, so for that reason we've put in some tough competition for the GTX 480 Lightning today which includes the HD 6850 in Crossfire.

We've got a few other cards including the HD 6870, GTX 460 Black from ECS and the GIGABYTE GTX 460 OC in SLI.

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.

Under Vantage we've got very strong performance from the GTX 480 Lightning. Over the last few months, though, we've put less emphasis on 3DMark Vantage and more on the games we test.