We would like to thank the following companies for supplying and supporting us with our test system hardware and equipment: Intel, ASRock, Kingston, Mittoni, Noctua and Corsair.

Today we'll be checking out the new 260.52 ForceWare driver against the 258.80 driver that we've been using for a while now. While our game lineup is shortened just a little, we're still including all the important stuff like Tessellation, PhysX and AA to name just a few things.

As for the cards we'll be using, we've got the GIGABYTE GTX 480 to look at the top end of the NVIDIA range and the ECS Black GTX 460, a model that just can't be ignored. The GTX 460 has become the card to own if you're looking at spending under $250 US and we hope owners, or future owners of that model will be able to find themselves with some extra performance from today onward.

Let's get started!

3DMark Vantage

Version and / or Patch Used: 1.0.1
Developer Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com
Product Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com/products/3dmarkvantage/
Buy It Here

3DMark Vantage is the new industry standard PC gaming performance benchmark from Futuremark, newly designed for Windows Vista and DirectX10. It includes two new graphics tests, two new CPU tests, several new feature tests, and support for the latest hardware.

3DMark Vantage is based on a completely new rendering engine, developed specifically to take full advantage of DirectX10, the new graphics API from Microsoft.

In Vantage we can see a nice little bump in both presets on both cards. Hopefully these increases translate to increases in real world games and aren't just limited to the synthetic benchmark that both NVIDIA and AMD put a lot of effort into.