NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 – The Super-Affordable Fermi

One of the more popular Internet memes for the past couple of years has been, “Can it run Crysis?”, but as soon as Metro 2033 launched, that’s a meme that should have died. Metro 2033 is without question one of the beefiest games on the market, and though it supports DirectX 11, it’s almost a feature worth ignoring, because the extent you’ll need to go to in order to see playable framerates isn’t likely going to be worth it.

Manual Run-through: The level we use for testing is part of chapter 4, called “Child”, where we must follow a linear path through multiple corridors until we reach our end point, which takes a total of about 90 seconds. Please note that due to the reason mentioned above, we test this game in DX10 mode, as DX11 simply isn’t that realistic from a performance standpoint.

We’re seeing a bit of a repeat with the performance here. As with Dirt 2, the GTS 450 came out ahead in our 1680×1050 test, but fell short in the others. And again, the SLI performance of the cards simply skyrocketed up our charts and sits right behind the much more expensive HD 5870.

As such an intensive game, none of our cards earned a spot as best playable for the settings above, but when each has the graphics turned down to “Medium”, the performance improves dramatically.