by Rob Williams on September 29, 2010 in Graphics & Displays
Been itching to buy a piece of NVIDIA’s Fermi architecture, but were looking for a total sweet spot? At $130, the GeForce GTS 450 might be it. In all of our tests, it competed nicely with AMD’s Radeon HD 5750, but most impressive might be the card’s scaling ability in SLI, which can be summed up in one word… awesome.
For fans of the original Mafia game, having to wait an incredible eight years for a sequel must’ve been tough. But as we found out in our review, the wait might be forgotten as the game is quite good. It doesn’t feature near as much depth as say, Grand Theft Auto IV, but it does a masterful job of bringing you back to the 1940’s and letting you experience the Mafia lifestyle.
Manual Run-through: Because this game doesn’t allow us to save a game in the middle of a level, we chose to use chapter 7, “In Loving Memory…”, to do our runthrough. That chapter begins us on a street corner with many people around, and from there, we run to our garage, get in our car, and speed out to the street. Our path ultimately leads us to the park, and takes close to two minutes to accomplish.
Given that NVIDIA worked very closely with 2K Games on this title, I had expected the GTS 450 to dominate, but that wasn’t the case at all. The HD 5750 came out just inches ahead, and for our SLI configuration, that came out right behind the HD 5850. So far, it’s the SLI performance that’s impressing me the most… it’s almost amazing.
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NVIDIA GTX 480 1536MB (Reference)
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2560×1600 – Max Detail, PhysX High, 0xAA
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23
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61.922
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AMD HD 5870 1GB (Sapphire)
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2560×1600 – Max Detail, PhysX Medium, 0xAA
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39
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60.947
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NVIDIA GTX 470 1280MB (EVGA)
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2560×1600 – Max Detail, PhysX Medium, 0xAA
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30
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50.955
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AMD HD 5850 1GB (ASUS)
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2560×1600 – Max Detail, PhysX Medium, 0xAA
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27
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38.468
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NVIDIA GTS 450 1GB (Reference SLI)
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2560×1600 – Max Detail, PhysX Off, 0xAA
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35
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49.230
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AMD HD 5830 1GB (Reference)
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2560×1600 – Max Detail, PhysX Off, 0xAA
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33
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39.252
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NVIDIA GTX 460 1GB (EVGA)
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2560×1600 – Max Detail, PhysX Off, 0xAA
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27
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38.625
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AMD HD 5770 1GB (Reference)
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2560×1600 – Medium Shadows, Medium Geometry, SSAO Off, 0xAA
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30
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44.030
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NVIDIA GTS 450 1GB (ASUS)
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1920×1080 – Max Detail, PhysX Off, 0xAA
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41
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54.285
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NVIDIA GTS 450 1GB (Reference)
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1920×1080 – Max Detail, PhysX Off, 0xAA
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38
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46.118
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AMD HD 5750 1GB (Sapphire)
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1920×1080 – Medium Detail, PhysX Off, 0xAA
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32
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47.660
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As odd as it may seem, even though the HD 5750 came out ahead in our standard tests, the GTS 450 proved the better card in our best playable tests. For whatever reason, the GTS 450 cards performed better at top settings without 0xAA at 1920×1080 than our HD 5750, which had to use medium detail settings.