3DMark Vantage measures Shader 4.0 (i.e., DirectX 10) performance and supports PhysX, a programming interface developed by Ageia (now part of NVIDIA) to transfer physics calculations from the system CPU to the video card GPU in order to increase performance. Mechanical physics is the basis for calculations about the interaction of objects. For example, if you shoot, what exactly will happen to the object when the bullet hits it? Will it break? Will it move? Will the bullet bounce back? Note that since we are considering only the GPU score provided by this program, physics calculations are not taken into account.

We ran this program under two 16:10 widescreen resolutions: 1680x1050 and 1920x1200, first using the “Entry” profile, which basically disables all kinds of video enhancements, and then using the “Performance” profile. The results being compared are the “GPU Scores” achieved by each video card.