Introduction

Today, NVIDIA launched its GeForce GTS 450 graphics processor, with all its partners bringing out their implementations. If you haven't read our reviews of the AXLE GeForce GTS 450 OC, ASUS ENGTS450 DirectCu TOP, MSI N450GTS Cyclone OC, Zotac GeForce GTS 450 AMP!, or the Palit GeForce GTS 450 Sonic Platinum, please do so, to understand what the card is worth in its single GPU form, it will factor heavily in your decision to buy one card first and add one in SLI later, or even buying two cards at once, for the kicks.



The GeForce GTS 450 supports 2-way NVIDIA SLI multi-GPU technology, which allows you to upscale performance by pairing your GTS 450 card with another GTS 450 of any other make. Since this is a mid-range, mainstream GPU, you will be hard pressed to buy two cards in one go, because for the same money you can buy a high-end single-GPU graphics card. What makes SLI a viable thing is the flexibility it offers to value-conscious buyers. If you have an SLI-compatible motherboard, you can just buy one GeForce GTX 460 card now and get gaming right away, later (we're talking months down the line), you can buy another of these cards to significantly increase graphics performance, which will also allow you to step up resolutions and eye-candy or keep up with the ever more complex games of the day.

In this review we're going to show you what to expect from NVIDIA's GeForce GTS 450 SLI, a roughly $260 solution at present. But don't be alarmed with the $260 figure, because by the time you're ready to buy your second card, you can expect the prices of these cards to go down by a good bit.

In addition to testing two cards at the NVIDIA reference clock speeds of 783 MHz core and 900 MHz memory, we also reviewed two cards running at 850 MHz core and 1000 MHz memory which represents the combination of two typical factory-overclocked GTS 450 cards.

Test System

Benchmark scores in other reviews are only comparable when this exact same configuration is used.

• All video card results were obtained on this exact system with the exact same configuration.
• All games were set to their highest quality setting

Each benchmark was tested at the following settings and resolution:

• 1024 x 768, No Anti-aliasing. This is a standard resolution without demanding display settings.
• 1280 x 1024, 2x Anti-aliasing. Common resolution for most smaller flatscreens today (17" - 19"). A bit of eye candy turned on in the drivers.
• 1680 x 1050, 4x Anti-aliasing. Most common widescreen resolution on larger displays (19" - 22"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.
• 1920 x 1200, 4x Anti-aliasing. Typical widescreen resolution for large displays (22" - 26"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.
• 2560 x 1600, 4x Anti-aliasing. Highest possible resolution for commonly available displays (30"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.

Aliens vs. Predator

Aliens vs. Predator is based on a merger of the Aliens and the Predators franchise: two legendary alien species that are in conflict with each other, fighting to the death with human marines caught in between. The first person shooter game was developed by Rebellion Studios, who also developed the first AVP PC title and released in February 2010. It was one of the first DirectX 11 games with support for new features like Tesselation, which is why AMD heavily promoted it at the time of their DX 11 card launches. We used the AVP benchmark utility with tesselation and advanced DX11 shadows enabled.