Benchmark Results: 3DMark Vantage And Far Cry 2
Our only synthetic gaming benchmark, 3DMark Vantage shows us that we should expect the new Radeon HD 5450 to perform slightly better than its predecessor, the Radeon HD 4550, but slower than the GeForce 9500 GT DDR2 and significantly behind the Radeon HD 4650. The GeForce 210 barely manages to achieve half of the 5450's synthetic score.
The Far Cry 2 results mirror our synthetic 3DMark numbers except that the new Radeon HD 5450 seems to have no advantage over the 4550. This is despite its 50 MHz core and 100 MHz memory clock rate advantage. If anything, the new card is a couple frames slower than the board that came before.
Our results are mostly academic in this title, since they mostly fall under 20 frames per second. But it is notable that the Radeon HD 5450 can perform on the razor's edge of playability at 1280x1024 with medium settings, as long as the shadow map resolution is lowered. Of course, we can't help but notice that the Radeon HD 4650 is a vastly superior gaming card. The GeForce 210, on the other hand, is unplayable across all resolutions.
