Firing Squad: ATI Radeon 5450 Performance Preview

Firing Squad writes: "So you're stuck with integrated graphics. The lure of an affordable $399 desktop PC was just too much to pass up. Unfortunately however, you're now finding that your PC's integrated graphics aren't quite capable of keeping up with your Left 4 Dead 2 or Team Fortress addiction, much less a more graphically advanced game like Crysis or Batman: Arkham Asylum. You now need a faster graphics card, but can't afford to shell out the $100 for something newer like a Radeon 5700 series GPU, instead your budget is about $50-$60. What do you do?"

[ATi_Elite]

looks like ATi has the Directx 11 market cornered from ultra high end all the way down to intergrated

[Letros]

but hopefully no one buys this card expecting to play anything with Dx11.

[Projekt7tuning]

Ugh!
That not quite game news worthy. Probably not to bad for a cheap HTPC though, or maybe light design work.

[Domer25]

This card is fifty bucks, what the hell are you expecting^^^^.

[Letros]

I AM not expecting anything other than the benchmarks, but with a big DX11 label on it, there will be uninformed people(yes there are people who don't know what a benchmark is) out there jumping on it thinking they can play Dirt 2 or something.

[ProjectVulcan]

This is really an OEM part, its not a gaming card. So its aimed at HTPC machines obviously. Thus the gaming tests in there really, i dont see much point without HD video tests, temperature and power consumption tests.

Integrated graphics are getting better and better, able to deal with HD video without too much worry these days. Even something like a basic core i3 machine with its on die graphics really does well with HD video, power consumption along with heat and just its small size is very impressive. Im not sure how much longer this section of graphics has left with the advent of on die graphics

[Perjoss]

"that's no moon"

[dirthurts]

For 50 bucks.
Anyone know what settings the games where ran at? If that is max settings, no AA of course, than that's pretty impressive. If it's min, then that's acceptable for the price range.

[hoops]

These cards are not really for gaming
http://www.hardocp.com/arti...

"This simple apples-to-apples test simply proves that the ATI Radeon HD 5450 will run a DX11 game title. In this test we are running DiRT 2 in DX11, but with the absolute lowest in-game settings. This means everything was either at "Low", "Ultra Low" or "Off" in the game at 1680x1050 with No AA and No AF. This is what was required to run at a somewhat playable framerate at 1680x1050 on the ATI Radeon HD 5450. We also ran the ATI Radeon HD 5670 at the same settings so you could see the difference in performance between these two price points ($49 and $99.)

What we see here is that the ATI Radeon HD 5450 can indeed run DiRT 2 in DX11, but without any of the special DX11 effects like Tessellation, Cloth or SSAO. Therefore, while we can run in the DX11 API, we cannot benefit from the special DX11 effects it provides."

"The ATI Radeon HD 5450 is squarely aimed at the HTPC crowd, or the crowd that wishes to upgrade from their mundane Intel integrated Graphics to gain DX11 support and much better gameplay comparatively. With the low power utilization, passiveness and ability to run Eyefinity + DX11, this makes the Radeon HD 5450 the most feature rich GPU at $50. Now we have a DX11 card we can buy for our mothers."

Don't expect to run any game using eyefinity with this card LOL

[dirthurts]

But it makes for a good media center or business card.
I have the 5850...so I'm not looking to purchase. I do however have some friends who could use this.