- 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 used the latest Dirt 2 game patch and used the built-in benchmark for the resolution of 1920x1200, various quality levels and with AA enabled.

With the Inno3D GT 430, the Dirt2 game is playable at 1920 x 1200 if you keep the quality settings as high as "Medium." That's not a bad tradeoff for a card of this category. The specific DX11 game also put the GT 430 in the lead over the Radeon 5670 OC and of course the 5570:

- 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 GT430 gave an average of ~10.50 frames per second, which is very low. It is obvious that the requirements of the game are very demanding for the card, at least for these settings. For comparison, even a a GTS 450 will give you an average ~22.60 FPS.

- 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. We will not present any numbers here since the Inno3D GT 430 could not produce more than 10 FPS under 1920 x 1200.

- Overclocking

We are ready to test the overclocking abilities of the Inno3D GT 430 graphics card.

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.

Without any extra efforts, we managed to get the GT 430 core run at 850MHz, the memory clock reached the 1080MHz and the shaders topped at 1700MHz. Under these circumstances, the reported temperature for the core was 72 degrees C, which is obviously high for the Inno3D's cooler to cope with.

Getting to some quick tests, this overclocking gave us 8 additional frames per second for the the Far Cry 2 , with the average gain to be around +5FPS. This means that overclocking the GT 430 could make the difference for some games.