And where did that thing about Intel come from?Anyway, I would argue that gaming performance definitely isn't at the top of peoples priority list when purchasing a card in this price range. So Nvidia is getting destroyed because an ultra low-end discrete graphics card from AMD offers decent HTPC performance in comparison to the GT430? lol. that's not exactly the impression I got after actually reading the review. Indeed, with twice as many shader cores as the GT 220, the GeForce GT 430 may offer the strongest competition for the 6450 on both the HTPC and gaming fronts.ĭragonsqrrlhmm. The GeForce GT 430 is Nvidia’s lowest-end card capable of this feat, and it typically costs about $70 (although a couple models can be found for $10 cheaper than that online).
Ironically, despite Nvidia’s lead in 3D alacrity, this card is not capable of playing back Blu-ray 3D over HDMI. The GeForce GT 220 DDR2 is also priced similarly to the Radeon HD 6450 GDDR5, and while it sports a powerful GPU and a 128-bit memory interface, it is crippled by slower DDR2 memory. It simply relies on more host processing to power through the decode pipeline.
Of course, the Radeon HD 5550 doesn’t support Blu-ray 3D decode acceleration, though it is capable of playing back this format over HDMI 1.4a. Although the GDDR5-equipped version of the 6450 might match the older board's memory bandwidth, its higher core clock does not compensate for its resource deficiency. It essentially doubles all of the Radeon HD 6450’s specifications: 320 shader processors, 16 texture units, and 8 ROPs operating on a 128-bit memory interface. The Radeon HD 5550 is far more interesting competition. And when it's equipped with GDDR5, the new card should serve up modest gaming results. This should enable a quantifiable performance difference, though.
We can see a clear evolution from the Radeon HD 5450 and Radeon HD 6450, with only the number of stream processors doubled.