The battle of the HTPC cards, Galaxy’s GT 520 vs. HD 6450 (GDDR5 vs. GDDR3)
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is an objective-driven, class-based first person shooter set in the Quake universe. Quake Wars pits the combined human armies of the Global Defense Force against the technologically superior Strogg, an alien race who has come to earth to use humans for spare parts and food. It allows you to play a part, probably best as an online multi-player experience, in the battles waged around the world in mankind’s desperate war to survive.
Quake Wars is an OpenGL game based on id’s Doom3 game engine with the addition of their MegaTexture technology. It also supports some of the latest 3D effects seen in today’s games, including soft particles, although it is somewhat dated and less demanding on video cards than many DX10 games. id’s MegaTexture technology is designed to provide very large maps without having to reuse the same textures over and over again.
For our benchmark we chose the flyby, Salvage Demo. It is one of the most graphically demanding of all of the flybys and it is very repeatable and reliable in its results. It is fairly close to what you will experience in-game. All of our settings are set to ‘maximum’ and we also apply 4xAA or 8xAA plus 16xAF in game. We usually test at 2560×1600 and 1920×1200 resolutions, but they are far too demanding for our target new cards so we will explore 1680×1050 – all details are maxed and we first start with 2xAA:
This game was not playable at 1680×1050 resolution with this level of AA on our HD 6450 nor the GT 420. So let’s drop the anti-aliasing completely while we test at 1280×720 resolution.
The three cards run this benchmark satisfactorily except for the HIS HD 6450. Strangely, the GTS 220 is still a stronger performer than the GT 520 although the GDDR5 version of the HD 6450 trades blows with our overclocked GT 520 in the summary.