Today NVIDIA launches their new GeForce GTS 450 Series of graphics cards. As the "GTS" naming suggests, the card is more of a mid-range part than a high-performance device. It is NVIDIA's expressed goal to offer a low priced DirectX 11 graphics card that the majority of gamers can afford - and still play the latest games.
Architecture
NVIDIA's GF106 GPU is based on NVIDIA's Fermi architecture, which was released earlier this year. In order to achieve the product performance and positioning NVIDIA was looking for, they disabled some components of the full GF106 core, resulting in the graphics processor for the GeForce GTS 450. Unlike other Fermi-class cards the changes here are quite limited. Basically NVIDIA removed two memory chips from the design, two chips less means 2x 32-bit less bus interface, so a single 64-bit memory controller got disabled. The memory bus width is closely coupled to the number of active ROPs in the GPU, so one ROP partition is also disabled. Overall this change enables board partners to build more price competitive products because of the reduced cost for memory chips and PCB signal routing. It helps NVIDIA to increase its GPU yields. This also leaves NVIDIA with the option to create a more powerful "GTS 455" SKU at a later time, that has a 192-bit GDDR5 memory interface, with likely 768 MB or 1536 MB of memory.
It's interesting to note that NVIDIA did not disable any of the streaming multiprocessor units (SMs), and all four SMs holding 48 CUDA cores each are enabled, giving the CUDA core count of 192. NVIDIA's reference clocks on the GeForce GTS 450 are fairly low with 783 MHz core, 1566 MHz CUDA cores, and 900 MHz memory, so it comes as no surprise that most board partners are shipping pre-overclocked cards at lauch.
The ASUS ENGTS 450 TOP DirectCU that we have on our test bench today is a factory overclocked version that comes at substantially increased clocks compared to the reference design: 925 MHz vs. 783 MHz. As cooling solution ASUS' DirectCU cooler is used which we have seen on a variety of other recent cards from ASUS.
Radeon HD 4850
GeForce GTS 250
Radeon HD 5750
GeForce GTS 450
ASUS GTS 450 TOP
Radeon HD 4870
Radeon HD 5770
GeForce GTX 260
GeForce GTX 460
Radeon HD 5830
GeForce GTX 275
GeForce GTX 460
Shader units
800
128
720
192
192
800
800
216
336
1120
240
336
ROPs
16
16
16
16
16
16
16
28
24
16
28
32
GPU
RV770
G92
Juniper
GF106
GF106
RV770
Juniper
GT200
GF104
Cypress
GT200
GF104
Transistors
956M
754M
1040M
1170M
1170M
956M
1040M
1400M
1950M
2154M
1404M
1950M
Memory Size
512 MB
1024 MB
1024 MB
1024 MB
1024 MB
512 MB
1024 MB
896 MB
768 MB
1024 MB
896 MB
1024 MB
Memory Bus Width
256 bit
256 bit
128 bit
128 bit
128 bit
256 bit
128 bit
448 bit
192 bit
256 bit
448 bit
256 bit
Core Clock
625 MHz
738 MHz
700 MHz
783 MHz
925 MHz
750 MHz
850 MHz
576 MHz
675 MHz
800 MHz
602 MHz
675 MHz
Memory Clock
993 MHz
1100 MHz
1150 MHz
900 MHz
1000 MHz
900 MHz
1200 MHz
999 MHz
900 MHz
1000 MHz
1107 MHz
900 MHz
Price
$95
$110
$125
$129
$139
$135
$140
$180
$170
$190
$230
$230
Packaging
Umm.. a Tiger-Man-Eagle thing on the front of the package? Whatever .. the front of the package emphasizes the "925 MHz" clock speed very nicely and also mentions the puny 783 MHz the reference design runs at, good job here, ASUS.