MSI P45 Platinum review and P45 to P35 comparison

Page 5 - Performance in 3DMark 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 60-70% in 3DMark, while in most games at times they couldn't get even 20% increase.

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.

Results here are disappointing, slightly higher CPU performance, slightly lower video card performance and overall lower results. MSI P45 Platinum in no way speaks of "new generation" according to the first test...