AMD's Radeon HD 6450: UVD3 Meets The HTPC
by Ryan Smith on April 7, 2011 12:01 AM ESTMass Effect 2
Electronic Arts’ space-faring RPG is our Unreal Engine three 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.
Most of Mass Effect 2’s graphical settings are locked in, so while there is some customization it doesn’t change the look of the game, or its performance for that matter. Depending on how fast you like your FPSes, it’s either 1280 or 1024 before the game becomes adequately playable, however most people should be good at 1280 with 34fps. As with Civilization V the gains over the 5450 are through the roof, as the 6450 just about doubles the 5450’s performance. Ultimately the less ROP-bound a game is, the better it’s going to do on the 6450 versus the 5450.
With that said, the 6450 does have trouble keeping up with faster cards at higher resolutions. While the 5570 is only ahead by about 15% at 1024, this becomes 43% at 1280. NVIDIA’s lineup also does quite well here as we’ve come to expect. Meanwhile Intel’s HD Graphics once again comes close; the HD3000 is only behind by about 20%, making it a potential threat at 1024.
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veri745 - Thursday, April 7, 2011 - link
"... and this is what happens when the 5570 and GT 430."Typo or unfinished sentence?
JarredWalton - Thursday, April 7, 2011 - link
"Even a slight discount on a more expensive product blows the entire lineup out of the water, and this is what happens with the 5570 and GT 430."In other words, the 5570 and GT 430 with only a minor discount on pricing blows away the 6450, at least from a pure performance perspective. Power and potentially HTPC use still could go to the 6450.
789427 - Thursday, April 7, 2011 - link
So you buy an APU - you get stunning graphics.You bought an Intel CPU - the extra $50 is what you pay to get a great CPU and HD graphics.
Honestly, this is for joe soap and his HD monitor and will probably be branded as such!
cb
ImSpartacus - Thursday, April 7, 2011 - link
It might also be nice for a productivity Eyefinity setup. I can't wait for AT to get a multi-monitor setup in their lab.khimera2000 - Thursday, April 7, 2011 - link
I cant wait till anandtech gets a multimonitor setup. then i can stop skimming the video card reviews :DIn this modern age EVERY video card being released has the ability to drive at least two displays, and with Eyefinity, and Nvidia's offering I consider reviews incomplete unless they use ALL the technology there ment to drive. as of this moment this has not happened here. without the support of this I can only assume... and I hate assuming when im reading a review.
As it stands, without the ability to test Eyefinity and similar set ups I dont think this place will ever be a final deal maker. and that's upsetting because if they cant get three monitors in for a normal test bed, we will probably never see reviews on how well other displays work in eyefinity.
considering that the 5xxx came out in 2009, two years have passed since that fan fair (give or take), there really is no excuse not to have it right now.
Springfield45 - Thursday, April 7, 2011 - link
I enjoy the tests on low end and low power graphics cards. One query though. Is the Radeon HD 5670 such an rare beast that no one has performance information? The HD 4670 was a wonderful upgrade for people that had OEM systems without the power supply to drive faster cards and it was recognized as that and reviewed quite well. Why was it's successor so ignored? Will there even be a successor in the 6xxx series?Ryan Smith - Thursday, April 7, 2011 - link
We keep a rolling database of performance results for GPU articles. The last time we did a low-end GPU article was with the GT 430 6 months ago, so we effectively didn't have any recent results for anything below a GTS 450. So for everything here below that, we had to rush to get results over a 2 day period. The 5670 was excluded because it's not particularly close in performance or pricing to the 6450. Everything we needed to say about how AMD had faster cards was covered by the 5570, which uses the same Redwood GPU anyhow.Anyhow, the 5670 does have a successor in Turks. Turks hasn't made retail yet so I can't say a whole lot about it, but its configured very similarly to Redwood. If and when it gets a retail release, you can expect to see a comparison to the 5670.
Springfield45 - Thursday, April 7, 2011 - link
Cheers!I did not mean to sound as if it was a problem that card was omitted from this test. I just found it odd that it was never reviewed at all on Anandtech (and very few other places as well) since the 4670 had made such a big splash.
Your articles are always on the top of my list a resources and I thank you for them!
Taft12 - Thursday, April 7, 2011 - link
The 5670 WAS reviewed on Anandtech:http://www.anandtech.com/show/2917
and since this review compares the 6450 closely to the 5570, a look at the 5570 review will give you an idea of where the 5670 bar would be in this article's graphs:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2935
The 5670 is the fastest card AMD or Nvidia ever released that didn't require a PCIE connector, although since Ryan not-so-subtly referred to a 6000-series replacement to 5670, that won't be the case much longer!
DLimmer - Thursday, April 7, 2011 - link
Not quite true.There's a 5750 that is "green" and doesn't require a PCIE connector.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...