Crysis: Warhead

Kicking things off as always is Crysis: Warhead, still the toughest game in our benchmark suite.Even 2 years since the release of the original Crysis, “but can it run Crysis?” is still an important question.

Ideally, NVIDIA would like the GTS 450 to be able to play everything at 1680x1050 at high settings with 4x anti-aliasing. Crysis of course eludes this, just as it does all attempts to play it at a decent framerate. Even the factory overclocked cards can’t muster 30fps here. For that we have to drop our settings to Gamer quality without AA.

Overall, at reference clocks the GTS 450 doesn’t fare so well here. At our standard 1680 setting it just falls to the Radeon HD 5750, and is miles away from the 5770. At Gamer quality it switches positions with the 5750, but still has quite a gap with the 5770. However the overclocked cards fare much better here, and they can bring the GTS 450 up to parity with the 5770. Since the cheapest 5770s are selling for no more than the GTS 450, ideally it (or its overclocked variants) need to be able to keep up with the 5770.

When it comes to minimum framerates the GTS 450 does a bit better here by edging out the 5750, but it takes a factory overclocked card to beat the 5770.

The Test BattleForge: DX10
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  • just4U - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link

    overclockers is the only review I've seen that shows the 250 in the mix and by the looks of it the 450 is a good 25-30% faster then the 250 on most games they tested with... what reviews are you reading?

    Personally I see no reason to rush out and buy two of these. A 460 is cheaper and to close in performance to justify it.
  • marraco - Tuesday, September 14, 2010 - link

    http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gts-45...
  • KG Bird - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link

    Nice review, but answer one question for me. Why does the HD 5770 scale well in crossfire while others like the HD 5870 don't?
  • heflys - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link

    That's one of the great mysteries that has plagued the Crossfire setup. Might just be crappy drivers. Who knows.....
  • Jedi2155 - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link

    Do it right...and do it right the first time is the name of the game.
  • OCNewbie - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link

    Why would they compare a GTS 450 overclocked to a stock 5770? Wouldn't it make more sense to compare apples to apples, or in this case, OC'd versus OC'd? If you're gonna OC the GTS 450, then wouldn't it be reasonable to expect you'd also OC the 5770? Doesn't the 5770 OC quite well? This is probably even less of a debate, as far as which is the best performer, if you factor in OC'ng to BOTH cards.
  • jabber - Tuesday, September 14, 2010 - link

    Most 5770 cards go up to 900/1300 pretty easy.

    Would leave the 450 even further in the dust however.
  • Belard - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link

    Looks like AMD still has a solid product line of DX11 parts. So an end-user would still be looking at the older 210~250 cards for the $40~80 market.

    AMD could still easily reduce their prices across the board... but guess they're going to wait until the 6000 series ships and them blow out the 5000 series for cheap.

    If the 6750 comes out at $120, but good deal faster than the 5770, that is going to hurt.
  • KingKuei - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link

    So what happened to the Release 260 drivers we were supposed to get this morning?

    Anand mentioned something about a bug in the driver related to OpenGL (or was it CUDA?) that they were going to fix before releasing it. Yet it's already late afternoon Monday and there's nothing on nVidia's site yet.

    The big deal for me actually is related to SC2. SUPPOSEDLY, this is the driver release that fixes many of the issues related to framerate drops in SC2. I care more about that than the GTS 450!
  • Spazweasel - Tuesday, September 14, 2010 - link

    One thing to note: there is a low-profile (double slot) version of this card already available from Palit. I can't find a low-profile 5770. For low-profile cases, this is therefore likely the best you can currently get, and given it's a low-thermal-impact part, this makes sense.

    The ball is in your court, Powercolor/Sparkle!

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