The battle of the HTPC cards, Galaxy’s GT 520 vs. HD 6450 (GDDR5 vs. GDDR3)

Mafia II

Mafia II is a third-person action-adventure video game which is the sequel to Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven. It is developed by 2K Czech and is published by 2K Games and was released last year. Mafia II is set from 1943 to 1951 in Empire Bay which is a fictional city based mostly on San Francisco and New York City along with some influences from Chicago and also Detroit.

Mafia II is a gritty drama which chronicles the rise of World War II veteran Vito Scaletta who joins the Falcone Crime Family and becomes a ‘made’ man. There are 15 chapters in the game and over two hours of game engine generated cutscenes. Mafia II makes extensive use of Nvidia’s PhysX whose full effects are seen smoothly only by playing on a PhysX-enabled GeForce and preferably with a second video card dedicated to it.

For this article, we used the full retail game with Mafia II’s built-in benchmark with the highest settings for 1680×1050 – without PhysX – and this time we will reserve comment until after presenting the charts. First we test at 1680×1050.

Now at 1280×720 and with low settings and note the individual AA settings.

The HIS HD 6450 is slower than the GT 520 although the GDDR5 version catches up with the overclocked Galaxy card. This covers our DX9 games. Let’s move on to DX10 and DX11 games to see if anything changes.