The high end of the graphics market is always the sexiest but we all know that the mid-range and more budget minded graphics cards are where the likes of AMD and NVIDIA make their money. The first release of the Fermi graphics cards in March of this year brought us the GeForce GTX 480 and GTX 470; both high performance cards but riddled with complaints about power consumption and heat. The GF100 GPU used in those two cards was not going to be well suited to make a move down to the low end space where the $200 price point is key.
In July we got the GeForce GTX 460 based on a completely revamped GPU, the GF104, that featured 336 CUDA cores (shader processors) compared to the 480 cores on the GTX 480 and 448 cores on the GTX 470. Not only that but NVIDIA took the time to re-balance the combination of shader cores, texture units and PolyMorph Engines (what NVIDIA uses for tessellation support in DX11). Those changes resulted in a GPU that was much more competitive in terms of performance per watt when placed against the AMD Radeon HD 5000 series of graphics cards and really became THE card to get in the $190-230 price range.
Today we are going another step lower as NVIDIA releases the GeForce GTS 450 that will retailed for $130-140.
See how the GeForce GTS 450 hold up against its direct competitor, the AMD Radeon HD 5770 here.
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