3DMark

Along with our changes in our cooling testing, we also added the new 3DMark Fire Storm benchmark to our test suite. We are debating on removing the now dated 3DMark Vantage benchmark in the near future, please feel free to voice your opinion on that potential change in the comments or on our forums. The new benchmark from 3DMark is amazing and put the PCS+ HD 7870 under considerable load. I’m excited to test other cards and fill in the graphs a little more as well. Along with the regular Fire Storm we are also including the “Extreme” version of the benchmark as well. The best part of this benchmark is that you can also duplicate this same benchmark for free, just be sure to compare the Graphics Score’s not overall scores to be able to see how your current video card compares to the PCS+ HD7870.

Looking at our 3DMark 11 and Vantage results we can see how the PCS+ HD7870 compares to previously tested cards like the GTX 660 as well as how driver improvements have improved performance when compared to past HD7870 results. All in all, it’s amazing to me still that this card is getting results just slightly shorter than the EVGA GTX580 Classified and frankly it is also very close to our launch numbers from the HD 7970 as well. It’s amazing what a year or tweaking can get you. The older 3DMark Vantage showed that AMD had already tuned for it in the past, our Vantage numbers are spot on from what we saw from other HD7870’s with similar clock speeds last year.