The battle of the HTPC cards, Galaxy’s GT 520 vs. HD 6450 (GDDR5 vs. GDDR3)
Lost Planet
Lost Planet: Extreme Condition is a Capcom port of an Xbox 360 game. It takes place on the icy planet of E.D.N. III which is filled with monsters, pirates, big guns, and huge bosses. This frozen world highlights high dynamic range lighting (HDR) as the snow-white environment reflects blinding sunlight as DX10 particle systems toss snow and ice all around.
The game looks great in both DirectX 9 and 10 and there isn’t really much of a difference between the two versions except perhaps shadows. Unfortunately, the DX10 version doesn’t look that much better when you’re actually playing the game and it still runs slower than the DX9 version.
We use the in-game performance test from the retail copy of Lost Planet and updated through Steam to the latest version for our runs. This run isn’t completely scripted as the creatures act a little differently each time you run it, requiring multiple runs. Lost Planet’s Snow and Cave demos are run continuously by the performance test and blend into each other.
Here are our benchmark results with the more demanding benchmark, Snow. All settings are fully maxed out in-game including 2x or 4xAA/16xAF. Let’s start with 1680×1050 resolution with 4xAA.
The resolution is set too high for our cards. Next we test at 1280×720 and with 1xAA:
It’s still a slideshow although the GDDR5 version of HD 6450 nearly catches the GT 520. We would play this game on the DX9 pathway.