nVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 Pro Reviews

The big problem for the Nvidia GeForce GTS 450 is the fact the HD 5770 is still on the market for the same price, and that last-gen DirectX11 GPU is still one of the best budget cards around. Sadly then, for Nvidia at least, the GTS 450 still has no place to call its home. It's head and shoulders above the lower-end AMD cards, but there are still more impressive options available to us consumers for the same price.

This $129 DirectX 11 graphics card provides plenty of horsepower for gaming on 22-inch and smaller monitors, as well as the full feature set of Nvidia’s pricier cards.

This is a review of the reference design for the GeForce GTS 450 cards in single and SLI modes. NVIDIA has finally released a competitive product in the $100-200 price range and with the launch of their mobile parts, it's quite clear they will also release parts for the more mainstream 50-100 price point in the near future.

Our GeForce GTS 450 SLI versus Radeon HD 5770 CrossFireX and Radeon HD 5750 CrossFireX comparisons today have revealed that GeForce GTS 450 SLI is on the bottom end of performance in this price range.

Regardless, the new GeForce GTS 450 is a solid offering and users in need of a graphics card in its price range should give it some serious consideration. With the similarly, albeit somewhat higher, priced Radeon HD 5770, users can take advantage of Eyefinity, but the GeForce offers support for PhysX and CUDA. If you’ve got a single monitor, it may even come down to brand preference. The bottom line is, there is now some competition in the mainstream DX11 GPU arena, which is always a good thing for consumers.

Ultimately, the real story is price. As of this writing, AMD has dropped the cost of its 5770 cards to about $139, which makes it slightly more attractive as an alternate to the GTS 450. If your budget is constraining you to this particular corner of town, the GTS 450 will do the job, but if the 5770's price stays this low, there's not a lot of reason to pick the GTS 450 instead.

Therefore, I am comfortable saying that NVIDIA SLI does scale better than ATI CrossFire because out of the nine tests we ran, never once did the CrossFire solution scale better than NVIDIA SLI! Both AMD and NVIDIA multi-GPU configurations were found to be easy to setup and use though, so if you are on the fence about adding a second card to your system for improved performance you can expect to see very good performance improvements across a wide variety of game titles. I hope you enjoyed this article as it was fun to benchmark a topic that often doesn't get as much attention as you would expect due to time constraints. If you have any questions or comments be sure to leave them in the forum!

We were truly impressed by the new GeForce GTS 450. From the eight games and simulations we ran, the GTS 450 only lost to its main competitor, the Radeon HD 5750, in one (Metro 2033). In all others it was either faster or achieved the same performance level. The improvement in PhysX performance compared to the previous generation mid-range video card from NVIDIA, the GeForce GTS 250, was also impressive (43% improvement as measured by Darkest of Days). If you are looking for a mid-range card in the USD 130 price range, the new GeForce GTS 450 is the way to go.

Efficient SLI scaling for the NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 GPU means that users adding a second board can expect to see a performance increase to the tune of 70 per cent, along with entry into the 3D Vision and three-monitor clubs. Worth putting on the shortlist if you have £200 allocated for your next graphics upgrade.

Those fans of the HTPC should rejoice for that. The GTS 450, much like the GTX 460, offers bitstreaming support for Dolby True HD and DTS HD Master Audio over HDMI so you can get your high definition sound and picture through the HDMI port. Add in your 3Dvison kit and you get Blu-Ray movies in 1080p and Stereoscopic 3D. If you use this card for strictly gaming, you can load up a second card and make use of NVIDIA's 3D Surround technologies to get a more immersive gaming environment. With the horsepower a second card brings, you can turn up the eye candy and get the whole package with PhysX effects and surround!

The GeForce GTS 450 SLI is impressive. It gives you exactly the flexibility you'd want when building a cost-effective gaming PC, and later giving it a great graphics performance boost with a second card. The GTS 450 SLI can handle any of the latest games at HD resolutions. Go for it if you want to buy graphics hardware in two installments of $130-$150 each. If you have $300 to blow upfront, buy a single graphics card, like the GeForce GTX 470 or the Radeon HD 5850 and leave yourself room to install a second graphics card whenever you can afford it or feel you need the performance.

GTS 450 offers considerable power for the money when driven at the most common monitor resolutions (1280x1024 and 1680x1050). This usually creates an interest in a pairing two cards together for an SLI set, which we've tested to work especially well with NVIDIA's 3D-Vision Surround technology. Priced at time of launch for $129.99 the mid-level 1GB GeForce GTS 450 video card is a far better choice than AMD's $120 Radeon HD 5750, and in many cases it makes the $150 Radeon HD 5770 look unfit for its price point. This will undoubtedly cause AMD to reduce pricing for both models, which is almost guaranteed to be announced on the same day. If AMD can reduce pricing down into the $130 price point for the Radeon HD 5770, NVIDIA's GeForce GTS 450 will find itself in a very close fight for mainstream supremacy. Regardless of the moving target that has become a product's retail price, GeForce 3D-Vision is a NVIDIA-exclusive technology that's certainly worth the cost of admission; and two GTS 450s are going to a lot more for budget gamers who want the most out of their money.

At its heart, the GTS 450 is a card that makes an extremely good replacement for the infinitely long in the tooth GTS 250 1GB. Not only does it offer better performance than the G92-based card but the GF106 also offers better efficiency and a slightly more compact design. It should be apparent however that the GTS 450 1GB shouldn’t be considered a viable upgrade path for GTS 250 users. Sometimes this new card does run all over the outgoing $130 product, but in our opinion the now $169 GTX 460 768MB makes a lot more sense as an actual performance upgrade. In case you were wondering, the shockingly large gap between the GTS 450 and GTX 460 768MB will be plugged by overclocked versions of the 450 for the time being.