NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 – The Super-Affordable Fermi

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.

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.