- Dirt 2 (DirectX 11)

Colin McRae: Dirt 2 (known as Dirt 2 outside Europe and stylised, DiRT) is a racing game released in September 2009, and is the sequel to Colin McRae: Dirt. The game runs on an updated version of the EGO engine, which powered Codemasters' Race Driver: Grid as well. The engine features an updated physics engine and makes pretty through use of the DX11’s tessellation abilities.

We installed the the game patch and measured the in-game performance of the Inno3D GTX460 768MB graphics card at 1920x1200 and with the AA enabled:

The Inno3D GTS 450 has good performance here and it is more powerful than the Club3D HD5570.

- Alien vs Predator Benchmark v1.03 (DirectX 11)

Rebellion has released a standalone DirectX 11 PC benchmark test based upon its shooter Aliens vs. Predator. The benchmark test requires a graphics support supporting DirectX 11, which are used to produce such fancy features as tessellation, advanced shadow sampling and DX11 anti-aliasing.

We used the default settings of the benchmark (resolution: 1920 x 1200, Texture Quality: 2, Shadow Quality: 3, Anisotropic Filtering: 16, SSAO: ON, Vertical Sync: OFF, DX11 Tessellation: ON, DX11 Advanced Shadows: ON, DX11 MSAA Samples: 1).

The Inno3D GTS 450 gave an average ~22.60 FPS, which can be considered as good result for a mid-range card.

- Lost Planet 2 Benchmark (DX9/DX11)

The Lost Planet 2 benchmark allows you to measure the performance of your graphics card using a a pre-configured route within the game. The benchmark can be run under both DX9 and DX11. The Inno3D GTS 450 iChiLL performed well at the resolution of 1280x1024. A more powerful solution is required in order to enjoy the game at higher resolutions:

- Overclocking

Finally, we are ready to test the overclocking abilities of the Inno3D GTS 450 iChiLL. NVIDIA is heavily promoting the overclockability of the card to the press, so let' s move on to the tests.

For our overclocking tests we used the latest MSI AfterBurner utility which also allows you to unlock the card's voltages allowing further tweaking. We enabled the 'Core Voltage' slider (though the 'settings' tab). The Core Voltage slider can go very high to further increase the overclocking margins although we feel that you won't need to go very high here. The 'Core' and 'Shader' sliders are synched and move as one, allowing you to play with the 'Memory' slider as well. The package also includes the 'MSI Kombustor' application that stresses your graphics card and test its stability.

While we attempted to get some decent overclocking results, our attempts using the MSI's AfterBurner or Nvidia Performance Utilities were not very successful. Our system kept locking after a few-minute test with the Kombustor software. We also used some retail games in order to test the stability of the card but we noticed the same behavior.

We managed to get a fairly stable 900MHz core and 950MHz memory frequencies. These are not as high as many other reviewers have posted online in their articles. Although the GTS 450 iChill is factory overclocked we hoped to push overclocking a little bit more..