Conclusion

Compared to AMD’s previous generation of bottom-tier cards, the Radeon HD 5450 doesn’t offer too many surprises. Cards at this end of the spectrum have to give up a lot of their performance to meet their cost, power, and form-factor needs, and the 5450 is no different. It certainly produces playable framerates for most games (and even at high settings for some of them), and it’s going to be a great way to convince IGP users to move up to their first discrete GPU. But for a bottom-tier GPU, spending a little more money has always purchased you a great deal more powerful video card, and this hasn’t changed with the 5450.

The concern we have right now is the same concern we’ve had for most of AMD’s other launches, which is the price. The card we tested is a $60 card, smack-dab in the middle of the territory for the Radeon HD 4550, the DDR2 Radeon HD 4650, and the DDR2 GT 220. We don’t have the DDR2 cards on hand, but the performance gap between bottom-tier cards like the 5450 and those cards is enough that the DDR2 penalty won’t come close to closing the gap. If performance is all you need and you can’t spend another dime, then a last-generation card from the next tier up is going to offer more performance for the money. The 5450 does have DX11, but it’s not fast enough to make practical use of it.

Things are more in favor of the 5450 however when we move away from gaming performance. For a passively cooled low-profile card, its competition is the slower GeForce 210, and a few Radeon HD 4550s. The 4550 is still a better card from a performance standpoint, but it’s not a huge gap. Meanwhile the 5450 is cooler running and less power hungry.

Currently it’s HTPC use that puts the 5450 in the most favorable light. As the Cheese Slices test proved, it’s not quite the perfect HTPC card, but it’s very close. Certainly it’s the best passively cooled card we have tested from an image quality perspective, and it’s the only passive card with audio bitstreaming. If you specifically want or need Vector Adaptive Deinterlacing, the Radeon HD 5670 is still the cheapest/coolest/quietest card that’s going to meet your needs. But for everyone else the 5450 is plenty capable and is as close to being perfect as we’ve seen any bottom-tier card get.

To that end the Sapphire card looks particularly good, since based on our testing they're able to drop the reference 5450's clumsy double-wide heatsink for a single-wide heatsink without the card warming up too much more. For Small Form Factor PCs in particular, it's going to be a better choice than any card that uses the reference heatsink, so long as there's enough clearance for the part of the heatsink on the back side of the card.

Moving away from the 5450 for a moment, besides the Radeon HD 5770 this is the only other card in the 5000-series that is directly similar to a 4000-series card. In fact it’s the most similar, being virtually identical to the 4550 in terms of functional units and memory speeds. With this card we can finally pin down something we couldn’t quite do with the 5770: clock-for-clock, the 5000-series is slower than the 4000-series.

This is especially evident on the 5450, where the 5450 has a 50MHz core speed advantage over the 4550, and yet with everything else being held equal it is still losing to the 4550 by upwards of 10%. This seems to the worst in shader-heavy games, which leads us to believe that actual cause is that the move from DX10.1 shader hardware on the 4000-series to DX11 shader hardware on the 5000 series. Or in other words, the shaders in particular seem to be what’s slower.

AMD made several changes here, including adding features for DX11 and rearranging the caching system for GPGPU use. We aren’t sure whether the slowdown is a hardware issue, or if it’s the shader compiler being unable to fully take advantage of the new hardware. It’s something that’s going to bear keeping an eye on in future driver revisions.

This brings us back to where we are today, with the launch of the 5450. AMD has finally pushed the final Evergreen chip out the door, bringing an end to their 6 month launch plan and bringing DirectX 11 hardware from the top entirely to the bottom – and all before NVIDIA could launch a single DX11 card. AMD is still fighting to get more 40nm production capacity, but the situation is improving daily and even with TSMC’s problems it didn’t stop AMD from doing this entirely in 6 months. With the first Cedar card launched, now we’re going have a chance to see how AMD chooses to fill in the obvious gaps in their pricing structure, and more importantly how NVIDIA will ultimately end up responding to a fully launched 5000-series.

Power & Temperatures
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  • andy o - Thursday, February 4, 2010 - link

    So far the most reasonable explanation I've seen by googling is someone if a forum suggesting that its function is just disabling certain features so as to prioritize smooth playback over those features. I don't see any difference with the 5770, otherwise (with that card it doesn't disable anything).
  • UNCjigga - Thursday, February 4, 2010 - link

    I sort of assumed it was similar to what 120hz/240hz LCD TVs do: use a frame doubler to more closely match your monitor's refresh rate and give the impression of "smooth" motion.
  • andy o - Thursday, February 4, 2010 - link

    I don't think so, most PC displays are 60 Hz, and I think even most 120 Hz TVs only take up to 60p input. There's only a couple of 120Hz-input monitors.
  • therealnickdanger - Wednesday, February 10, 2010 - link

    Actually, most CRTs using analog connections are capable of 120Hz. DVI, HDMI, and DisplayPort do not support digital transmission speeds over 60Hz. It's a sad state of affairs if you ask me.
  • sc3252 - Thursday, February 4, 2010 - link

    I know this isn't exactly supposed to be a fast card, but its clocked ~10% faster yet its slower than the last generation card... I can't say I am surprised though, after seeing the 5770 clocked faster than the 4870 yet being around the same speed.
  • StevoLincolnite - Thursday, February 4, 2010 - link

    I think people are missing allot of the big picture here and that's Crossfire with the Radeon 54xx series.
    Specifically with the new 8 series of chipsets, hence the amount of shaders present, I expect a return of Hybrid Crossfire.

    Pairing an IGP with a low-end card is a very cost effective solution to getting more performance out of a system and also gives AMD an edge in getting more people to buy an AMD Processor+Chipset+Graphics card.
  • ereavis - Thursday, February 4, 2010 - link

    "me too" I'd dig a 758G Hybrid Crossfire review with this and the other sub $100 Radeons (if they support x-fire) 785 was a great motherboard to match with the Athlon II and Phenom II X2-X3, some of us were waiting on video card purchases and would like to see Crossfire 54XX/56XX compared to a 5750 discrete for example.
  • JarredWalton - Friday, February 5, 2010 - link

    Fun fact: HD 5450 is about 40% faster than my pathetic old 7600 GT in my work PC. Remember when 6600 GT was da bomb? LOL
  • QuietOC - Thursday, February 4, 2010 - link

    The 80 shader discrete Radeons are just too limited by 64-bit DDR3. The 785G has more bandwidth and the same number of ROPS (mine even runs fine at 1GHz.) If they had cut the power usage of the 5450 down a lot more it may have made some sense.
  • Totally - Thursday, February 4, 2010 - link

    5770 128-bit bus, 4870 256-bit bus

    again 5450 64-bit bus, 4550 128-bit bus

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