AMD Radeon 6450 512MB Graphics Card Review

Recently, AMD have been pushing out their latest high-powered GPU’s to very impressive results. However, at the same time they have been quietly sneaking out some smaller low-priced graphics cards. In fact this is one of the cheapest DirectX 11 graphics cards money can buy which on the face of it should be able to cope with multiple screen gaming all be it not the most intensive of media and gaming scenarios.

This card, the AMD Radeon HD 6450 is aimed at those who are looking to get a ‘performance gaming system’ that can cope with the very latest of games. It is however aimed at those of us who can’t afford to buy its bigger brothers and want a relatively cheap and low cost option to improve our graphics solutions. It is effectively an entry-level card, but one that will still allow you to experience the latest games while only being the first step up from the onboard graphics that some of you may still have the misfortune of experiencing.

Graphics cards are a big market and AMD are one of the largest. Recently they have been pouring out their new range of 6 series graphics cards – ranging from the 6450 to the beast of the 6990. So far, we have hardly heard a bad word against them. Here at eTeknix we will thoroughly test this graphics card and will do our best to compare it to others on the market – that being said there are hardly any graphics cards that are as low-priced as this so unfortunately we will have to go back to an older generation for our comparisons.

Specifications

• 625-750 MHz engine clock
• 512MB-1GB DDR3/GDDR5 memory
• 533-800 MHz DDR3 (1.066-1.6 Gbps) or 800-900 MHz GDDR5 (3.2-3.6 Gbps) memory clock
• 8.5-12.8 GB/s (DDR3) or 25.6-28.8 GB/s (GDDR5) memory bandwidth
• 200-240 GFLOPS Single Precision compute power
• TeraScale 2 Unified Processing Architecture
  [LIST]
• 160 Stream Processing Units
• 8 Texture Units
• 16 Z/Stencil ROP Units
• 4 Color ROP Units

[*]GDDR5/DDR3 memory interface
[*]PCI Express 2.1 x16 bus interface
[*]DirectX® 11 support

• Shader Model 5.0
• DirectCompute 11
• Programmable hardware tessellation unit
• Accelerated multi-threading
• HDR texture compression
• Order-independent transparency

[*]OpenGL 4.1 support
[*]Image quality enhancement technology

• Up to 12x multi-sample and super-sample anti-aliasing modes
• Adaptive anti-aliasing
• Morphological anti-aliasing (MLAA)
• 16x angle independent anisotropic texture filtering
• 128-bit floating point HDR rendering

[*]AMD Eyefinity multi-display technology¹

• Native support for up to 3 simultaneous displays
  [LIST]
• Up to 4 displays supported with DisplayPort 1.2 Multi-Stream Transport

[*]Independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls, and video overlays
[*]Display grouping

• Combine multiple displays to behave like a single large display

[/list][*]AMD App Acceleration²

• OpenCL 1.1
• DirectCompute 11
• Accelerated video encoding, transcoding, and upscaling^2,5

[*]UVD 3 dedicated video playback accelerator

• MPEG-4 AVC/H.264
• VC-1
• MPEG-2 (SD & HD)
• Multi-View Codec (MVC)
• MPEG-4 part 2 (DivX, xVid)
• Adobe Flash

[*]Enhanced video quality features

• Advanced post-processing and scaling
• Dynamic contrast enhancement and color correction
• Brighter whites processing (blue stretch)
• Independent video gamma control
• Dynamic video range control

[*]Dual-stream 1080p playback support
[*]DXVA 1.0 & 2.0 support
[*]AMD HD3D technology⁴

• Stereoscopic 3D display/glasses support
• Blu-ray 3D support
• Stereoscopic 3D gaming
• 3rd party Stereoscopic 3D middleware software support

[*]Cutting-edge integrated display support

• DisplayPort 1.2
  [LIST]
• Max resolution: 2560×1600 per display
• Multi-Stream Transport
• 21.6 Gbps bandwidth
• High bit-rate audio

[*]HDMI 1.4a with Stereoscopic 3D Frame Packing Format, Deep Color, xvYCC wide gamut support, and high bit-rate audio

• Max resolution: 1920×1200

[*]Dual-link DVI with HDCP

• Max resolution: 2560×1600

[*]VGA

• Max resolution: 2048×1536

[/list][*]Integrated HD audio controller

• Output protected high bit rate 7.1 channel surround sound over HDMI or DisplayPort with no additional cables required
• Supports AC-3, AAC, Dolby TrueHD and DTS Master Audio formats

[*]AMD PowerPlay™ power management technology³

• Dynamic power management with low power idle state

[*]AMD Catalyst™ software and HD video configuration software

• Unified graphics display drivers
  [LIST]
• Certified for Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows XP

[*]AMD Catalyst™ Control Center

• Software application and user interface for setup, configuration, and accessing special features of AMD Radeon products

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