3DMark Vantage measures Shader 4.0 (i.e., DirectX 10) performance. We ran this program under its “Entry” profile, which basically disables all image quality enhancements and set resolution to 1024x768.

On this program the on-board video from ECS A785GM-M achieved the same performance as the on-board video from Sapphire PI-AM2RS780G (AMD 780G). Here Biostar TA785GE 128M (AMD 785G with 128 MB) was 3.73% faster and ECS A790GXM-A (AMD 790GX with 128 MB) was 27.52% faster than the reviewed motherboard.

A Radeon HD 3450 with 64-bit interface achieved a performance 13.60% higher than the on-board video from ECS A785GM-M.

Enabling Radeon HD 3450 to work together with AMD 785G under CrossFire mode increased gaming performance by 75.61% compared to the on-board video alone and 54.59% compared to the video card alone. This is fantastic, because this performance boost is gained absolutely for free.