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Stone Giant is a 3rd party Direct X 11 benchmark developed by BitSquid and FatShark to demonstrate the benefits of pervasive tessellation in a game setting. BitSquid is a start up formed in 2009 from the lead engineers at GRIN, who were the developers of Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter (and others). Their publisher, FatShark, is based in Sweden and recently released ‘Lead and Gold” on Steam.
This benchmark uses tessellation extensively and DirectCompute to render high quality depth of field with soft bokeh.
We run this benchmark at 1680×1050.
As we recorded earlier in the Unigine Heaven Benchmark, the Stone Giant Benchmark heavily favours the nVidia hardware due to superior Tessellation performance. The XFX and Powercolor cards are close, as would be expected. The GTS450 has a 12 fps lead with this test.
It is really good to see lower end cards reviewed here, the high end boards are great, but I doubt many people can afford them.
That XFX board is great. looks like a bargain to me.
This market is really so friggin sweet right now. anyone with a semi decent sized monitor, this is all they need. im not a gaming fanatic so maybe people wouldnt agree.
Nah its a good point Tom. if someone has a 1920×1200 screen, a 460GTX is all they need, unless they want crazy performance. 1080p, or 1680 then the cards on test today are great. the low end is so strong right now, it has to be killing high end cards sales.
I actually might pick one of these up for my kid brother for christmas. we are all putting a system together for him. cant believe how good the performance is for the price.
XFX and Sapphire, only cards to buy IMO
450GTS is good but I dont think its a dominating product like the 460 was. its killed 5830, and even hurt 5850’s. The 450 is a good board but the overclocked ATI cards are really going punch for punch.
I like that single slot design. the powercolor card is different but the shape looks weird.
Fantastic review, loads of detail and useful info.
wonder how long it will be for other sites to copy the return to idle concept 😉
GTS450 is a good card but I agree, it isnt dominating like the 460 is. the price is good and I like evga, this would be my choice out of the three, mainly cause I dont like catalyst.
@ Tri Color – Catalyst is great now, not a problem, I wouldnt let the drivers put you off the hardware.
@ Stefan – nah, they still suck. my buddy has a 5850 and the cat alyst 10.8 broke his HDMI scaling and every time he boots up he has to fix it. same with Cat 10.9. they are still a poor driver compared to nvidia forceware.