Palit GTS 450 Sonic Platinum – The Supercharged GTS 450

Testing Platform

Moving on to performance testing, we brought in the GeForce GTS 250 and ATI Radeon HD 5770 for comparison purposes. The hardware combination used in our test is as follows.

Processor: Intel Core i7 930 @4 GHz (200×20)
Motherboard: Gigabyte X58A-UD3R
Graphics card : Palit GTS 450 Sonic Platinum, NVIDIA GTS 450, NVIDIA GTS 250, ATI HD 5770
Memory : 3×1GB Kingston KHX16000D3T1K3/3GX
Harddisk: Western Digital Caviar Black 500 GB (32 MB Cache)
Power Supply: Enermax Revolution 85+ 1050 Watt
Heatsink : Gelid Tranquilo
Monitor: Philips 221E
Input: Genius (Keyboard and Mouse)
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 32-bit
Driver: NVIDIA Forceware 260.52, NVIDIA Forceware 258.96, ATI Catalyst 10.8

Test Results

Alien VS Predator

Setting : DirectX 11; Texture Quality – Very High; Shadow Quality – High; SSAO – On; AF x16; No-MSAA

This game, derived from a popular movie franchise, now comes enhanced with DirectX 11 features. At 1920×1080, Palit’s Sonic Platinum was around 17% faster compared to a reference GTS 450, while at 1360×768, its performance is about 16% better than a standard card.

CRYSIS

Setting : DirectX 10; Quality Preset – High; No-AA

Crysis was arguably the most technologically advanced game of its time. Back then, only the very best graphics cards were able to run this title with an acceptable frame rate. The GTS 450,however, would have no problem running the game smoothly. Palit GTS 450 Sonic Platinum performed around 17% faster than NVIDIA’s reference card at 1360×768. The performance difference remained consistent at around 16% when we increased the resolution to 1920×1080.

LEFT4DEAD

Setting : No-AA; AF-Trilinear; Maximum Quality

At 1360×768, we can see that the Sonic Platinum produces 14% more frames compared to the reference version of GeForce GTS 450. As for 1920×1080, it’s about 16% faster than the standard card. The source engine used by this game is relatively “lightweight”, so all graphics card in our test generated dozens of frames per second even in higher resolutions.

Metro 2033

Setting : DirectX 11; Advance DOF, No-Advance PhysX, MSAA x4, AF x16

”Very High” Graphics Setting – At 1360×768, Palit GTS 450 Sonic Platinum was 14% faster than the reference GTS 450 card. At 1920×1080, Palit’s graphics card secured a 16% lead.

”High” Graphics Setting –At both 1920×768 and 1360×768 resolutions, the Sonic Platinum performed 15% better than the reference version of GeForce GTS 450.