3DMark Vantage measures Shader 4.0 (i.e., DirectX 10) gaming performance. We ran this program under the “Extreme” profile, which sets resolution to 1920x1200, Anisotropic filtering to 16x and max out all quality settings to the maximum allowed. We are going to analyze two results. The 3DMark score and the CPU score. Currently with so much processing in 3D games being migrated from the CPU to the GPU (graphics processing unit; the graphics processor present on the video card), replacing the CPU with a more powerful one doesn't impact gaming performance as much as it used to happen several years ago.

Under the “Extreme” profile from 3DMark Vantage all CPUs achieved the same performance level. This shows how for high-end gaming the video card is the component that most influences performance, not the CPU, as mentioned above.

Comparing exclusively the CPU benchmark results from 3DMark Vantage, Core i5-750 achieved a score 5.69% higher than Phenom II X4 965 and 7.51% higher than Phenom II X4 955.