AMD's Radeon HD 6450: UVD3 Meets The HTPC
by Ryan Smith on April 7, 2011 12:01 AM ESTStarCraft II
Blizzard’s latest RTS is CPU-bound under most situations, but with low-end GPUs most scenes become GPU bound as long as there aren’t too many active units on the screen. With the 6450 we can easily manage Medium quality, but higher quality modes quickly swamp these low-end GPUs.
Even at 1280x1024 the 6450 gets 60fps in our GPU replay, showcasing just how forgiving StarCraft II is on GPU performance. Compared to the 5450 the 6450’s lead is once again quite large, but it’s actually slightly smaller than in other games, indicating that this simple to draw game is on the verge of becoming ROP-bound. As a result the 5570 and the NVIDIA lineup do very well for themselves here, with the 5570 doing almost 50% better while the GT 430 is 65% ahead. In practice the game is just GPU reliant enough at these settings that you need a low-end dGPU instead of an iGPU for smooth framerates.
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ET - Sunday, April 10, 2011 - link
I think that DDR3-1866 is unlikely to be currently used in a budget system. It's still a premium speed. Anyway I was referring to the E2-3250, the budget Llano, which will have (though not announced officially) only DDR3-1600 support and a sub-450MHz clock rate. That puts it at under 60% performance of the Radeon 6450 based on clock speed (I think that memory won't further impact performance), which based on the test results should drop its performance under the HD 3000 in many cases.The low end A4 chips, which have ~600MHz clocks, 80% of the 6450 (but may be more likely to be affected by memory speed), are more likely to compete well with the HD 3000, but there are still cases in this review where the HD 3000 was over 80% of the 6450 in terms of FPS, so they could lose there.
Anyway, that's not to bash Llano, just trying to get more of an understanding of it. I think it's better to keep expectations low and be pleasantly surprised later than the other way round.
Gungel - Friday, April 8, 2011 - link
Just found this incredible expensive offer on HP's store front:HP QM229AA Radeon HD6450 512MB DDR3 $129.00
Are they nuts?
aarste - Saturday, April 9, 2011 - link
Would have been nice to see some 23.976 fps testsSxotty - Sunday, April 10, 2011 - link
Why is it a great HTPC card if it is loud? That is one of the worst blemishes for that purpose. The review says it is surprised it is so loud and assumes other models will be quiet. That means that unless you get a passively cooled model you could likely end up with an annoyingly loud card that is completely anathema to the HTPC environment. As such recommending the card for that purpose seems silly without additional disclaimers. Quiet is more important for HTPC than passing all the HQV tests b/c cards always make noise, and only sometimes have to do weird cadences.Ryan Smith - Monday, April 11, 2011 - link
Keep in mind this is an internal reference design. It won't see the light of day in retail. Retail cards will (for better or worse) have different coolers.Lolimaster - Monday, April 11, 2011 - link
You wont find an HD3000 intel IGP on the price range of low end dual core Llano. Hey, you wont even find an HD2000 for the same price xD.This 160SP Llano should cost around 60-70. More or less what current Athlon II X2 cost.
ch1n4 - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 - link
Hi,Did you have time to make the HTPC relevant tests with the 6450? Additionally it would be very useful to see the difference in performance between the DDR-3 Version and the DDR-5 Version. It's a shame that only the DD3- Version has got a passive cooler. Therefore it would be very important to know if the Radeon 6450-DDR3 is the Perfect HTPC Card, or only the DDR-5 Version? Or none of them and the Radeon 5570 is still the King of HTPC.