AMD Radeon HD 6450 Review: Caicos Cometh
AMD populates the entry-level tier with its new Radeon HD 6450, based on the Caicos graphics processor. Does this board have what it takes to stand out in the crowded sub-$100 market and vie for a spot in your next home theater PC?
HD Video Quality: HQV 2.0 Benchmark
While we recently reviewed a wide spectrum of Radeon and GeForce cards using the HQV 2.0 HD video quality benchmark, we retested the following cards using newer drivers.
| HQV Benchmark version 2.0 Results (out of 210 possible) | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Row 0 - Cell 0 | GeForce GT 220 | GeForce GT 430 | Radeon HD 6450 | Radeon HD 5550 | Radeon HD 5450 |
| Test Class 1:Video Conversion | 87 | 87 | 89 | 89 | 89 |
| Test Class 1: Noise and Artifact Reduction | 20 | 20 | 44 | 44 | 44 |
| Test Class 3: Image Scaling and Enhancements | 30 | 30 | 30 | 30 | 15 |
| Test Class 4: Adaptive Processing | 20 | 20 | 7 | 7 | 7 |
| Totals: | 157 | 157 | 170 | 170 | 155 |
The good news is that the Radeon HD 6450 handles the same visual quality settings as the Radeon HD 5550, and delivers the same HD video quality result. To our surprise, the GeForce GT 220 and GT 430 properly handled all of the tested video cadences, something many Nvidia cards demonstrated a problem with in our last review. Kudos to the GeForce driver team for fixing these issues that we previously identified.
To summarize, the Radeon HD 5450 loses points because it is not powerful enough to handle compression artifact de-blocking. The GeForce GT 220 and GeForce GT 430 also lose points for a lack of this feature and skin-tone correction, but gain some points because of their ability to perform real-time contrast enhancements.
In the final analysis, the Radeon HD 6450 and Radeon HD 5550 take the lead in this price segment when it comes to HD video playback quality, with very good noise and compression artifact reduction.
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Prev Page Benchmark Results: H.A.W.X. 2 Next Page Blu-ray 3D Decode Acceleration BenchmarkDon Woligroski was a former senior hardware editor for Tom's Hardware. He has covered a wide range of PC hardware topics, including CPUs, GPUs, system building, and emerging technologies.