NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 – The Super-Affordable Fermi

It’s not that often that faithful PC gamers get a proper racing game for their platform of choice, but Dirt 2 is one of those. While it is a “console port”, there’s virtually nothing in the game that will make that point stand out. The game as a whole takes good advantage of our PC’s hardware, and it’s as challenging as it is good-looking.

Manual Run-through: The race we chose to use in Dirt 2 is the first one available in the game, as it’s easily accessible and features a lot of GPU-pounding effects that the game has become known for, such as realistic dust and water effects, a large on-looking crowd of people and fine details on and off the track. Each run-through lasts the entire two laps, which comes out to about 2.5 minutes.

Prior to us receiving our samples of the GTS 450, NVIDIA stated that the card should compete nicely with the HD 5750, but so far, it’s AMD’s card that’s come out ahead. The one exception is at 1680×1050… but that changed at the higher resolutions. To be fair though, the performance of the GTS 450 couldn’t be called poor… it’s pretty well on par with the HD 5750 in the real-world.

There is something still impressive to gleam from these graphs though… the performance of the GTS 450 in SLI. It’s almost as powerful as the HD 5870, which costs $140 more!

As good-looking as Dirt 2 is, all of our cards managed to handle it at 2560×1600 just fine, even with 4xAA enabled. For the lower-end cards, including the GTS 450, medium detail settings had to be used, but even then, the game looked good, and ran like a dream.