NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 – The Super-Affordable Fermi

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.

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.