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.
Just Cause 2 might not belong to a well-established series of games, but with its launch, it looks like that might not be the case for long. The game offers not only superb graphics, but an enormous world to explore, and for people like me, a countless number of hidden items to find around it. During the game, you’ll be scaling skyscrapers, racing through jungles and fighting atop snow-drenched mountains. What’s not to like?
Manual Run-through: The level chosen here is part of the second mission in the game, “Casino Bust”. Our runthrough begins at the second-half of the level, which requires us to situate ourselves on top of a car and have our driver, Karl Blaine, speed us through part of the island to safety. This is a great mission for benchmarking as we get to see a lot of the landmass, even if some of it is at a distance.
It’s clear that Just Cause 2 is optimized to work on AMD GPUs, even if it’s not on purpose. Even ASUS’ overclocked TOP card couldn’t overtake the stock-clocked HD 5750. Again though, the performance differences aren’t quite night and day, though they are still there. Our SLI configuration didn’t have quite as good a showing as it did with Dirt 2.
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|
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AMD HD 5870 1GB (Sapphire)
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2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA
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27
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38.29
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NVIDIA GTX 480 1536MB (Reference)
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2560×1600 – Max Detail, SSAO Low, 0xAA
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29
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39.137
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AMD HD 5850 1GB (ASUS)
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2560×1600 – Max Detail, High Water, High Objects, 0xAA
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27
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38.468
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NVIDIA GTX 470 1280MB (EVGA)
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2560×1600 – Max Detail, Medium Shadows, Medium Water, Medium Objects, SSAO Low, 0xAA
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33
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37.932
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NVIDIA GTS 450 1GB (Reference SLI)
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2560×1600 – Max Details, Medium Shadows, Medium Water, Medium Objects, High-Res Shadows Off, SSAO Off, 0xAA
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39
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46.988
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AMD HD 5830 1GB (Reference)
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2560×1600 – Max Detail, Medium Shadows, Medium Water, Medium Objects, High-Res Shadows Off, SSAO Off, 0xAA
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31
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38.230
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AMD HD 5770 1GB (Reference)
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1920×1080 – Max Detail, High Water, High Objects, SSAO Medium, 0xAA
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31
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42.332
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NVIDIA GTX 460 1GB (EVGA)
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1920×1080 – Max Detail, Medium Shadows, Medium Water, Medium Objects, High-Res Shadows Off, SSAO Low, 0xAA
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43
|
48.724
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NVIDIA GTS 450 1GB (ASUS)
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1920×1080 – Max Detail, Medium Shadows, Medium Water, Medium Objects, SSAO Medium, 0xAA
|
32
|
37.682
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NVIDIA GTS 450 1GB (Reference)
|
1920×1080 – Max Detail, Medium Shadows, Medium Water, Medium Objects, High-Res Shadows Off, SSAO Off, 0xAA
|
39
|
45.059
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AMD HD 5750 1GB (Sapphire)
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1920×1080 – Max Detail, Medium Shadows, Medium Water, Medium Objects, High-Res Shadows Off, SSAO Off, 0xAA
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35
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43.306
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One of the best things about Just Cause 2 is that it allows in-depth graphics customization so that you can tweak to your heart’s content and make sure you get a result that runs well on your particular GPU. Since this is a rather intensive game, our single-card GTS 450’s topped out at 1920×1080 resolution, but still retained good detail settings. Our SLI configuration boosted our performance and game detail settings up to HD 5830 levels.