Performance Mandel FPU | 3DMark Vantage
Mandel FPU test
The Mandel FPU benchmark measures double precision (also known as 64-bit) floating-point performance through the computation of several frames of the popular "Mandelbrot" fractal. The code behind this benchmark method is written in Assembly, and it is extremely optimized for every popular AMD and Intel processor core variants by utilizing the appropriate x86 or SSE2 instruction set extension.
Now if you come from the Commodore 64 / Amiga era like me, you can probably remember rendering Mandelbrot graphics, a mathematical formula that's much like a paradox, never ends and thus is repetitive. Back in 1998 it took me a full day to complete one Mandelbrot image. Amazing where we are right now as the same set of calculations can be done in seconds & even real-time.
The FPU Mandel test again is HyperThreaded, multi-processor (SMP) and multi-core aware. That's pretty nice floating point performance for the Amilo Sa 3650. But let's place the fosuc on gaming.
3DMark Vantage (DirectX 10)
3DMark Vantage focuses on the two areas most critical to gaming performance: the CPU and the GPU. With the emergence of multi-package and multi-core configurations on both the CPU and GPU side, the performance scale of these areas has widened, and the visual and game-play effects made possible by these configurations are accordingly wide-ranging. This makes covering the entire spectrum of 3D gaming a difficult task. 3DMark Vantage solves this problem in three ways:
1. Isolate GPU and CPU performance benchmarking into separate tests,
2. Cover several visual and game-play effects and techniques in four different tests, and
3. Introduce visual quality presets to scale the graphics test load up through the highest-end hardware.
To this end, 3DMark Vantage has two GPU tests, each with a different emphasis on various visual techniques, and two CPU tests, which cover the two most common CPU-side tasks: Physics Simulation and AI. It also has four visual quality presets (Entry, Performance, High, and Extreme) available in the Advanced and Professional versions, which increase the graphics load successively for even more visual quality. Each preset will produce a separate, official 3DMark Score, tagged with the preset in question.
The graphics tests will have four quality presets available: Entry, Performance, High and Extreme. Each preset specifies a certain setting for the rendering options listed in section 5.6. The graphics load increases significantly from the lowest to the highest preset. The Performance preset is targeted for mid-range hardware with 256 MB of graphics memory. The Entry preset is targeted for integrated and low-end hardware with 128 MB of graphics memory. The higher presets require 512MB of graphics memory, and are targeted for high-end and multi-GPU systems.
So for 3DMark vantage here we show the results with Graphics boost enabled only. The GPU score is roughly 3000 points and makes it slightly slower than the reference 3870 graphics cards. But considering this is an external solution, I'd say a 20% performance decrease seems fair enough.
