MSI GT640X - Gaming Laptop Review

Page 5 - Tests - 3D Synthetic

3D Mark Vantage

3DMark has established itself as "benchmark number one" for determining the gaming performance of any given computer. This in great extent is very wrong, because due to its popularity, AMD and NVIDIA optimize the drivers of their videocards way too much in favour of 3DMark, making it inadequate for any relevant determination of of the ingame performance of the card, where it is not that well optimized. A good example for this is the fact that the gaming solutions of both NVIDIA and AMD including two graphical cores (SLI/Crossfire) for example can get increase of around 50% in 3DMark, while in some less popular games at times they couldn't get even 30% increase. Of course nowadays most of the developers do optimize themselves their products to use more effectively multiple cores and threads.

3DMark Vantage on the other hand is the last from the series and unlike any other game or benchmark is written exclusively for DirectX 10. For the time being in order to preserve compatibility with older computers, all the games actually use the DirectX 9 framework and have additional layer of DirectX 10 effects. For Vantage you need Windows Vistа (with SP1, adding DirectX 10.1 support and ShaderModel 4.1), but the test is one of the most interesting ones, if not for the fact that it tests the capabilities of newest video chips, then because Futuremark (the company that created it) is soon to release the first game based on the 3DMark Vantage core.

3D Mark 06

We saw fit to include in our series of test the older 3D Mark 06 too.

oZone3D FurMark 1.6.5

Furmark had become well established OpenGL stability test amongst hardware enthusiasts. Besides stability, the benchmark can test in variety of modes the performance too. And even though no one will be "playing" Furmark and the results from it are purely synthetic (thus not giving clear ideas as to how will in reality the card perform), it is nevertheless interesting to see how does the latest generation of chips compete in this OpenGL challenge.

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We clearly see that in synthetic 3D tests, as expected, the desktop machine holds high ground