Mass Effect 2

Electronic Arts’ space-faring RPG is our Unreal Engine 3 game. While it doesn’t have a built in benchmark, it does let us force anti-aliasing through driver control panels, giving us a better idea of UE3’s performance at higher quality settings. Since we can’t use a recording/benchmark in ME2, we use FRAPS to record a short run.

Like HAWX, Mass Effect 2 is one of the GTS 450’s best games. Here it’s in a dead heat with the Radeon HD 5770 and leaves the 5750 in the dust. With overclocking taken in to account and it can approach the 60fps threshold at 1680 with 4x anti-aliasing. 1920 is also playable, but 37fps may not be the best choice for this game.

DIRT 2 Wolfenstein
Comments Locked

66 Comments

View All Comments

  • 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!

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now