Benchmark Results: 3DMark Vantage

We set the stage early with 3DMark Vantage-based synthetic results. In the grand scheme of things, these hold very little weight, since I can’t even remember the last time I played a synthetic game (horrible joke, sorry). Nevertheless, it’s provocative that, at every setting, the Radeon HD 4770 is able to match or exceed Nvidia’s GeForce GTS 250 and nudge right up to ATI’s own Radeon HD 4850. Forget the 4830—this new card smokes it in the suite score.

The GPU-only scores are largely repetitive, though the Radeon HD 4670 with 512 MB GDDR4 seems to take a relative hit here. The card’s strange behavior continues on the CPU-only test, where it takes a nearly 2,000-point hit for no good reason. We dug into this a bit with ATI and discovered some of the company’s older drivers were causing the HDMI Audio device to eat up significant CPU cycles. This was fixed in the 9.4 release (so upgrade if you haven’t already). We didn’t observe the higher utilization numbers, though, so we’ll continue exploring possible explanations.

Update: With all of the Radeon HD 4770 tests finished, we circled back, re-imaged the drive, re-installed Catalyst 9.4, and tested the board again. A CPU suite score of 19,892 is consistent with the other scores listed here. Apparently, even after uninstalling an older driver, the wrong ATI Function driver was installed upon updating to 9.4. A clean wipe of the drive fixed this.