NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 performance overview

When I woke up this morning my mailbox was flooded by dozens of press releases about NVIDIA's new GeForce GTS 450 graphics cards. Before I move on to share all the news, it's time to take a look at a couple of reviews to see if this new card is worth its salt.

Our first stop is AnandTech, the site concludes the GeForce GTS 450 delivers performence between the ATI Radeon HD 5750 and 5770. If AMD kept the price of the Radeon HD 5770 at $140+ the GeForce GTS 450 would have been a nice alternative, but as AMD dropped the 5770 price to $130 the GTS 450 is not aggressive enough on a price/performance basis.

Ultimately the card is not so slow that we would completely write it off; if you need to be in the NVIDIA ecosystem for whatever reason you could grab the GTS 450 and be satisfied without feeling like you’re missing too much by not going with the Radeon HD 5770. But if you’re a free agent and have no attachment to NVIDIA’s ecosystem, there’s not a game we benchmarked today where the 5770 was more than a hair’s width slower. Thus at NVIDIA’s new $130 price point the card to get is not the NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450, it’s the AMD Radeon HD 5770. It’s a bit warmer and a bit louder than the reference GTS 450, but the performance gap is hard to argue with.

The Tech Report writes ATI's Radeon HD 5770 has a slight performance advantage, but notes the real-world difference between the two cards is all but imperceptible.

Like we said earlier, we don't really have much interest in debating the finer points of product pricing and value when there's only ten bucks or so between the offerings. At present, street prices on the Radeon HD 5750 have dropped to $120 in certain cases, to greet the GTS 450. Whether a gap between these two products will remain in the long run is anyone's guess. We do know that we would unequivocally pay the extra in order to get the additional performance you will in stepping up from a stock GTS 450 to the Asus TOP card we tested—or from a Radeon HD 5750 to a 5770. Then again, we'd also recommend stretching whenever possible from the $140 cards up to the $170 GeForce GTX 460 768MB, which was the fastest product in our test by a good margin and, we think, represents the best value, too.

Our final stop is Legit Reviews, this site has written a review of the GeForce GTS 450 in single-card and SLI configuration. This site reports the performance of the GeForce GTS 450 and Radeon HD 5770 is fairly equal, and notes you have to consider the features that each card offers and what brand you are loyal to, if any.

After spending a week testing four different NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 video cards we have to admit we are very impressed with the performance of the video card in both single card and SLI configurations. For between $129 and $149 the cards that we tested here today pack a mean punch for the price you pay. If you play games at 1280x1024, 1680x1050 or 1440x900 the GTS 450 video card won't disappoint as long as you are okay turning down the AA and some of the image quality settings in the game. The NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 easily walks all over the ATI Radeon HD 5750 and actually performed equally with the similarly priced ATI Radeon HD 5770! Both cards lead the other in four benchmarks and then in the final benchmark each card led in one of the resolutions tested. The GeForce GTS 450 and the Radeon HD 5770 appear to be fairly equal, but then you have to consider the features that each card offers and what brand you are loyal to, if any.