ATI’s Radeon HD 5450 – The Perfect HTPC Card?

Like Call of Duty, Crysis is another series that doesn’t need much of an introduction. Thanks to the fact that almost any comments section for a PC performance-related article asks, “Can it run Crysis?”, even those who don’t play computer games no doubt know what Crysis is. When Crytek first released Far Cry, it delivered an incredible game engine with huge capabilities, and Crysis simply took things to the next level.

Although the sequel, Warhead, has been available for just about a year, it still manages to push the highest-end systems to their breaking-point. It wasn’t until this past January that we finally found a graphics solution to handle the game at 2560×1600 at its Enthusiast level, but even that was without AA! Something tells me Crysis will be de facto for GPU benchmarking for the next while.

Manual Run-through: Whenever we have a new game in-hand for benchmarking, we make every attempt to explore each level of the game to find out which is the most brutal towards our hardware. Ironically, after spending hours exploring this game’s levels, we found the first level in the game, “Ambush”, to be the hardest on the GPU, so we stuck with it for our testing. Our run starts from the beginning of the level and stops shortly after we reach the first bridge.

There are few things on this earth as horrible as running Crysis on a low-end graphics card, but for as far as that goes, the HD 5450 proved about 43% faster than the 210.

Like the GT 220, we were able to retain our 1280×1024 resolution with the HD 5450 with the caveat being a decrease to the “Minimum” detail settings. At those settings, though, the game still looks remarkably good, and played very, very well, despite the recorded minimum FPS.