Nvidia GeForce GTS 450 Is Out

The card is out for reviewers and there are no surprises in store since I last had a look at leaked pictures of the card and benchmarks. It's a 192 shader card with a 128 bit bus, based in the GF104 updated "Fermi" design.
More after the jump.

The GF106 chip is just a cut down GF104 with only one GPC, cut down to 256KiB of L2 cache and which keeps the three 64 bit memory controllers and 24 ROPs. As you can see from the picture of the card, the GTS 450 only has 4 memory chips, so these cards come with only a 128bit bus. Looking at the data, one can see that the card the GTX 460 is 60% faster despite having 75% more shaders. It looks like the card may have a bottleneck associated with the lack of shaders(for the full 192bit bus) and Nvidia may have opted to cut on the bandwidth to a level that would allow a more competitive price for the card, while giving up only around 10% of the performance. Nvidia is targeting less than $130.

While the card does perform a little bit better than the AMD's Radeon HD 5750, this just cause benchmark pretty much sums up the whole picture. Nvidia's new chip has such an hard time to keep up with the 5770 that Nvidia is betting on overclocking to barely manage a win. In my books the 1GiB Radeon HD 5750 is still a decent buy, hovering at $120, $10 less than the GTS 450 suggested retail price and about the same overclocking potential.

The Good

There are some points in favor of Nvidia's new card:

• Excellent idle power, slightly better than AMD's  cards
• Better thermals and noise
• Better architecture for GPU computing
• Excellent overclocking (more than 900MHz, up from 783MHz)
• The best Linux driver support there is

If you want a gaming card, AMD's cards support Eyeffinity, Nvidia's cards support PhysX. To me, none is a deciding point on this price range. I'd say Nvidia's cards may be slightly more future proof as they have an architecture that better lends themselves to high tessellation loads.

The Bad

• Slightly more expensive
• Same performance while almost a year late
• Next generation performance?

I say to go with the GeForce GTX 460 1GiB, or even the 768MiB one, instead of this new card. The price difference isn't that much, as it currently stands at around $50 for some models, and will bring a whole new level of performance.
I'm keeping my G92 card for a while longer while AMD doesn't release more details about the upcoming Radeon HD 6000 series cards that are expected to debut next month. From what I can see right now, Nvidia is set to take a beating in the following months.

For a more in depth look, please drop by The Tech Report's Review.