The Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 Benchmark
Adobe doesn’t actually support all nVidia GPUs, but only a handful which include only the GTX 470, GTX 485, GTX 285 plus many of the Quadros. In order to enable this test, we used the Mercury Playback Engine Hack provided by this site. Adobe has officially said that they won’t disable this method of enabling hardware acceleration so we might get official support eventually. We also used the benchmark put together by the folks at this site. Instead of following their instructions, we simply used their sequence for H.264 and exported our sequence to the YouTube HD preset without the audio and timed it with a stopwatch. But you should run their benchmark at least once so they can fill in their database with that useful info.
As you can see, there is a noticeable advantage when the hardware acceleration is enabled on this very inexpensive $129 US GPU. Although this is actually in minutes, imagine all the time saved if you were editing hundreds of hours of video per year. That’s not even including all the time saved not having to pre-render to view on the timeline. Overclocking the GPU did make a small difference but if you’re doing mission critical work, I’d leave it at the stable stock speed. We’ll continue to add GPUs to this benchmark.
Power Consumption
Overall, the power consumption is comparable to the HD 5770 with the exception being idle consumption. The GTS 450 seems to consume fewer watts when it’s not doing anything.
Temperatures
Using only the completely stock cooling solution, the GTS 450 does get rather toasty at load. You can also see how much better the GTX 460 does with MSI’s Cyclone cooler. Given that the GTS 450 is less demanding than the GTX 460, and the fact that the GTX 460 is cooler than both the HD 5770 and HD 5830 which use non-reference coolers, I’d expect the GTS 450 to be a very cool customer with the right non-reference cooler.
Final Thoughts on nVidia’s GTS 450
I’m really loving what nVidia is doing this last half of 2010. They are finally showing that they are listening to their customers and producing a product that allows their partners to create a great performing cards at a very reasonable price point. It’s too bad they let AMD/ATI get away with such a huge lead over the last few quarters as they figured out how to get the formula right. GTS 450 and GTX 460 are showing that the hardwork is finally paying off.
Performance of this card is impressive. Especially at the price point of around $129 US and it’s very likely that you’ll see it priced even lower than this. nVidia’s shouldn’t be afraid to put this on the 1080p list because in all our tests, the card performs great and competes favourably against the slightly more expensive HD 5770 in more than a few of the benchmarks, either beating it decisively or meeting it. The best part is that it produces some very playable frame rates in most tests and if you need a few more frames, the GPU overclocks effortlessly and it makes a difference. Budget gamers are definitely taken care of with the GTS 450.
While the performance and price are already doing it for me, nVidia has also enhanced the overall user experience as well with some unique features. While I can’t say I’m a fan of their 3DVision quite yet, I can say that I’m sold on their new driver package. The new 260 series drivers are a completely different approach for nVidia. While at first glance it borrows a lot from AMD/ATI in terms of the check list for what components to install, update, remove etc, it takes it one step further by allowing users to do a completely automated full uninstall which wipes the slate clean and ensures that your new GPU installs right the first time which is a huge plus in terms of a great user experience.
I also liked the fact that they worked on their 2D Surround which is their answer to ATI/AMD’s Eyefinity. While it isn’t as flexible as ATI/AMD’s solution and requires two GPUs, it has been made noticeably easier to use. I still like the AMD/ATI implementation of multi-monitor support and 2D image quality still goes to them but nVidia is getting closer now. On the serious video production side, it’s remarkable how much value this card adds to an Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 setup. Especially since you don’t need a $500 workstation card to get all the GPU accelerated features (unofficially of course).
Overall the GTS 450 is definitely a great budget or entry level GPU that offers a great deal of value and an uncompromised gaming experience at a very affordable price.
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