Legit Video Card Reviews

NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 SLI Video Card Review w/ ASUS, EVGA & MSI

Manufacturer: NVIDIA
Product: GeForce GTS 450
Date: Sun, Sep 12, 2010 - 11:00 PM
Written By: Nathan Kirsch -
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Unigine 'Heaven' DX11

Unigine DirectX 11 benchmark Heaven

The 'Heaven' benchmark that uses the Unigine easily shows off the full potential of DirectX 11 graphics cards. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. With the interactive mode emerging, experience of exploring the intricate world is within reach. Through its advanced renderer, Unigine is one of the first to set precedence in showcasing the art assets with tessellation, bringing compelling visual finesse, utilizing the technology to the full extent and exhibiting the possibilities of enriching 3D gaming. The distinguishing feature of the benchmark is a hardware tessellation that is a scalable technology aimed for automatic subdivision of polygons into smaller and finer pieces so that developers can gain a more detailed look of their games almost free of charge in terms of performance. Thanks to this procedure, the elaboration of the rendered image finally approaches the boundary of veridical visual perception: the virtual reality transcends conjured by your hand.

DirectX 11 benchmark Unigine engine

We ran the Heaven v2.1 benchmark that just recently out with VSync turned disabled, but with 8x AA and 16x AF enabled to check out system performance. We ran the benchmark at 1920x1200 and 1280x1024 to see how the benchmark ran at some different monitor resolutions. It should be noted that we ran the new extreme tessellation mode on this benchmark.  These are the toughest settings that you can run on this benchmark, so it should really put the hurt on any graphics card.

Unigine Heaven Benchmark

Benchmark Results: All of our GeForce GTS 450's were able to perform better than the EVGA GeForce GTX460 768MB SSC, at least at 1920x1200. The EVGA GeForce GTS 450 FTW and the ASUS ENGTS450 DirectCU TOP were able to perform 40% better than the GTX460. This is due to the GTX460's frame buffer filling up as we can see below. Even our reference NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 was able to outperform the EVGA GeForce GTX460 768MB SSC at 1920x1200 by nearly 19%!

Image Description

Just for fun we opened up GPU-Z during a run of Heaven 2.1 at 1920x1200 and found that the GPU memory used was maxed out at 765MB or 100% of the available video card memory on the 768MB GTX 460.

Next Page - FurMark 1.8.2


Review Index
Page 1 - GeForce GTS 450 Brings NVIDIA DX11 to $129
Page 2 - A Closer Look At The GeForce GTS450
Page 3 - ASUS, EVGA and MSI GTS 450 Video Cards
Page 4 - The New NVIDIA R260 Series Drivers
Page 5 - The Test System
Page 6 - Aliens vs. Predator
Page 7 - Batman: Arkham Asylum GOTY
Page 8 - Just Cause 2
Page 9 - Metro 2033
Page 10 - S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat
Page 11 - StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty
Page 12 - 3DMark Vantage
Page 13 - Unigine 'Heaven' DX11
Page 14 - FurMark 1.8.2
Page 15 - Power Consumption
Page 16 - Temperature Testing
Page 17 - GeForce GTS 450 1GB Overclocking
Page 18 - Final Thoughts and Conclusions