MOST WEBSITES TEND to stick to NDAs they sign, but from time to time people slip up and this seems to be the case of some early Nvidia GTS 450 benchmarks were posted over at Xtreme Systems. It’s not clear where the details come from, although some of the pictures of the card are watermarked with the word overclock, but we’re fairly certain that Nvidia are none too happy with this leak.
The benchmarks put the GeForce GTS 450 up against Nvidia’s own GTX 460 as well as AMD’s Radeon HD 5770. Beyond a stock GTS 450, Asus’ ENGTS450 TOP which is a slightly overclocked card is also part of the benchmark numbers. Judging by the results we’d say that the GTS 450 isn’t going to be a top seller as in most of the tests it’s no faster than a Radeon HD 5770. Considering that AMD will have a new range of cards out soon, we’d expect the gap to increase in AMD’s favour.
The GTS 450 is a fairly capable card, but to be able to compete with the Radeon HD 5770 some overclocking has to be done. Asus’ card offers just this with the GPU clocked at 925MHz compared to 783MHz stock for the GTS 450. The stock shaders are clocked at 1566MHz which Asus has pushed to 1850MHz on its card and the stock GDDR5 memory speed is 3.6GHz which Asus again has improved upon by clocking it to 4GHz. As the leaked details only consist of pictures some relevant details are missing, so we’ll stick with a brief overview of the benchmarks.
In FarCry 2 at 1920×1200 with the details set to ultra-high without AA the stock card manages an average of 51.24fps compared to 55.73fps for the 5770, 60.19fps for the overclocked Asus card and 76.3 for a 768MB GTX 460. That’s more than playable frame rate and considering that most displays top out at 1920×1080 these days it seems like this is the target Nvidia has been aiming for with the GTS 450.
Things aren’t as rosy in Crysis where none of the cards offer a playable frame rate at 1920×1200. The stock GTS 450 only manages an average of 14.29fps with the Asus card getting 16.56fps, the 5770 20.15fps and the GTX 460 21.56fps. In Call of Juarez things are looking up with the stock card managing an average of 38fps, the Asus card 44fps, the 5770 45.9fps and the GTX 460 56.9fps. Again quite playable, but not exactly impressive for a brand new mid-range graphics card.
Despite Asus’ best attempt at overclocking its card, it doesn’t seem to make a huge difference with FarCry 2 getting a mere 17 percent performance boost and the other games even less so. The GTS 450 should hit retail at around $149 for stock cards while overclocked models are likely to add $20-40. This isn’t terrible for a card that should play most games at more than 30fps at 1920×1080, but it doesn’t seem to be significantly cheaper than the GTX 460 768MB cards which can be had for around $190 now. It gets even worse when you realise that you can pick up a Radeon HD 5770 for less than $140 if you shop around, so it really comes down to how Nvidia prices the GTS 450 if it’s going to be a success or not.S|A
Lars-Göran Nilsson
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