Benchmarks: Battlefield Bad Company 2, Far Cry 2
Battlefield Bad Company 2 was tested using Fraps to record 60 seconds of gameplay from the level "Cold War". The game was tested using the best visual quality settings with 4xAA/16xAF enabled.
The Battlefield Bad Company 2 results at 1680x1050 saw the GeForce GTS 450 deliver just 36fps at 1680x1050 making it 8% slower than the Radeon HD 5750 and 28% slower than the Radeon HD 5770. Meanwhile the overclocked Palit GTS 450 Sonic Platinum card provided an additional 19% performance over the standard card though this was not enough to match the Radeon HD 5770.
Oddly at 1680x1050 it appeared that SLI was not working very efficiently either as we only saw a 47% performance increase when adding a second GeForce board.
Far Cry 2 Benchmarks
For testing Far Cry 2 we used the "Action Scene" from the custom benchmark tool. We feel this is an excellent representation of real gameplay performance. We used the best graphics settings available and 8xAA.
Far Cry 2 is a Nvidia specialty and at 1680x1050 the GeForce GTS 450 easily outperformed the Radeon HD 5770 and 5750 and even the more expensive 5830 fell victim here. The overclocked Palit GTS 450 Sonic Platinum graphics card was able to deliver 16% more performance with an average of 50fps making it just 3fps slower than the Radeon HD 5850.
This time we find that SLI is scaling very well with an effective 81% performance boost. This had the GTS 450 SLI couple matching the GeForce GTX 470 and easily beating the GeForce GTX 460 and Radeon HD 5870 graphics cards.