NVIDIA GTS 450 SLI Reference Review

•            GF106 chip

•            1.17 billion transistors

•            40nm TSMC process

•            783MHz core clock

•            1566 Processor clock

•            192 CUDA cores

•            902MHz memory clock speed

•            1024MB GDDR5 memory

•            128-bit memory bus interface

•            57.7GB/second memory bandwidth

•            25.1 Gigatexels/second texturing fill rate

•            GPCs 1

•            Streaming Microprocessors 4

•            Texture units 32

•            ROPs 16

•            106W TDP

•            Recommended Power Supply 400W

•            Thermal Threshold 95C

•            Connectors 2x Dual-Link DVI

•            1x mini-HDMI

•            2-slot

•            1x6-pin connector

•            DirectX 11

•            OpenGL 4.0

•            PhysX

•            3D Vision

•            3D Vision Surround

The GeForce GTS 450 is based upon NVIDIA’s new GF106 chip, which is based upon the same Fermi architecture as the GeForce GTX 480. The card is actually a derivative of the GF104 chip with the same number of CUDA cores per Shader Multiprocessor. While the GTX 480 has 480 CUDA cores organized into 4 graphics processor cores composed of 4 Shader Multiprocessors and 32 CUDA cores per processor, the GF106 is organized slightly differently.

The GeForce GTS 450 has a single Graphics Processing cluster with four Shader Multiprocessors each containing 48 CUDA cores. This brings the total number of CUDA cores to 192, compared to the 480 on the GTX 480, 448 on the 470, 336 on the GTX 465, and 336 on the GTX 460.  Coincidentally, the previous generation GeForce GTS 250 that this card replaces had 192 cores initially, with 216 core variants coming later.   Unlike the GeForce GTX 460 card, they did not disable a SM leaving room for upgrade on this chip.

Hardware Tessellation was introduced with the ATI’s Xenos chip on the Xbox 360 game console. The chip on the Xbox 360 was designed over five years ago. ATI introduced Tessellation into the video card space with the HD 2900XT in 2007. At the time, the card was ATI’s first card to support DirectX 10.0 features. Tessellation really came into the fore with the HD 5xxx series, as it was the first card to support the DirectX 11 feature fully. Tessellation allows higher polygon models to be used by subdividing the triangles into larger sets of triangles.

NVIDIA really pushed Hardware Tessellation with the launch of the GeForce GTX 480 and 470. The 480 had fifteen tessellation units on it, compared to the HD 5870s one and in benchmarks like the Uningine Heaven benchmark, this showed dramatic increases. The Uningine Heaven benchmark uses Tessellation throughout the benchmark. The GeForce GTS 450 has four PolyMorph engines or Tessellation units compared to the 8 found on the 460 and 15 found on the 480. This reduction is expected from a sub $200 video card and should still provide good tessellation performance in DirectX 11 games.

Ageia was a small startup company that developed a physics-processing unit (PPU) for the PC market. A few years ago NVIDIA bought Ageia and today every NVIDIA graphics card has the ability to use PhysX in games that support it. PhysX offers features like destructible terrain, clothing, flags, smoke effects and much more in current games like Mafia II, Metro 2033 and Batman Arkham Asylum. The GeForce GTS 450 supports PhysX as an NVIDIA GPU. Playing a game with PhysX on can dramatically improve the feel of a game that supports it as physics can change the way a game behaves when glass is hit for example.

3D Vision is NVIDIA’s technology for using stereoscopic glasses. Watching a movie like Avatar in 3D mode is completely different than a regular movie in 2D. The feeling of depth of a film is a great experience with upcoming televisions and Blu-ray drives supporting 3D movies. NVIDIA brings stereoscopic 3D to your computer through games. Almost any game can be played in 3D as it uses two shutter stereoscopic glasses with a 120Hz monitor to give a 3D effect in games. More than 350 games are supported.

3D Vision Surround is the ability to play games in Surround view along with the 3D. This requires the set of stereoscopic glasses, a 120Hz monitor, and two NVIDIA video cards. This has the advantage of playing games in 3D but the disadvantage is the inability to do it with a single card. Of course with two cards the performance will be much higher than a single card in a technology called SLI. SLI stands for Scalable Link Interface and the NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 is capable of two cards SLI.  This can nearly double the performance of a single card in certain applications. An Intel motherboard or nForce motherboard, two GeForce GTS 450s and an SLI bridge are required for SLI.