Benchmarks: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Dirt 2
To test Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 we used Fraps. We have changed the test scenario to the Hummer scene in "ACT I - Team Player" where your unit comes under fire traveling though the city. Best visual quality settings were used with 4xAA on a 60 second gameplay recording.
The GeForce GTS 450 was a fraction faster than the Radeon HD 5770 and 5750 graphics cards when testing with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 at 1680x1050. With an average of 39fps the GeForce GTS 450 provided modest performance in this game while the overclocked Palit GTS 450 Sonic Platinum card was only able to deliver 8% more performance.
Adding another GeForce GTS 450 card improved performance dramatically to 60fps where it matched the performance of the Radeon HD 5770 Crossfire cards.
Dirt 2 Benchmarks
Dirt 2 has a fantastic built-in benchmark tool that measures gameplay performance very accurately. Therefore we put down Fraps for this title and used that instead. The game was run in DirectX 11 mode with 4xAA enabled and the best possible visual settings.
When testing with Dirt 2 at 1680x1050 we found that the GeForce GTS 450 was able to deliver 47fps making it 7% faster than the Radeon HD 5750 and 6% slower than the Radeon HD 5770. Meanwhile the overclocked Palit GTS 450 Sonic Platinum card provided an additional 15% horsepower as it was able to render an average of 54fps.
Again we see impressive scaling from the GeForce GTS 450 SLI cards, which were 81% faster than a single card. Moreover they were 21% faster than the Radeon HD 5770 boards in Crossfire mode.