NVIDIA, together with their hardware partners has today unveiled the latest addition to the Fermi family, the GeForce GTS 450 in the Swissotel Le Concorde, Bangkok Thailand. Gadgets Magazine, together with other press from the Asia Pacific region had a firsthand look at NVIDIA’s newest card aimed at budget gamers.
Paul Liu, Director, APAC Channel Marketing wasn’t shy about telling the press what gamers thought of NVIDIA. “Gamers today, when they think about games, they think about NVIDIA. Games = NVIDIA,” he says, as he highlights the distinct NVIDIA advantage over their competition. Aside from the clear performance jumps from their Fermi architecture, Paul also pointed out that users don’t have to throw away their old graphics cards – they can simply connect them via SLI to their new cards and use the old ones as PhysX engines, which in turn improves game performance. Paul also shares that NVIDIA is serious about compatibility with today’s games and as a result they have established their own testing center to continually test hardware compatibility with games. The result is their clear market leadership when it comes to hardware sales – a study showed that out of 4.2 million PCs in iCafes in China, a staggering 89.8% use NVIDIA based graphics solutions.
Gaming isn’t the only space NVIDIA is an active player in either. John Milner, VP, GeForce Worldwide Channel Sales says that “the products that we make, touches your life in some way.” Aside from the GeForce line of products aimed at gamers, NVIDIA also has solutions for designers and Fortune 500 companies in the form of Quadtro, and supercomputing from their Tesla supercomputers. NVIDIA also has solutions for mobile devices in Tegra and Optimus.
The newest member of the Fermi family, the GeForce GTS 450, John extols, combines performance and value in one package. Sitting in the 99$ to 149$ price range depending on the manufacturer, the GeForce GTS 450 is a highly versatile GPU that’s a direct replacement of their GTS 250 GPU. It’s fully capable of DX11, and provides 2.4X greater geometry performance and 2X greater game performance when compared to its predecessor, the GTS 25o with DX11. The new card when stacked up against their competitor’s nearest equivalent, the 5770, performs better with the GeForce GTS 450 managing 50 FPS in Starcraft 2 against the 5770’s 42 FPS.
Of course, all of these benchmarks were done by NVIDIA themselves, and while we can’t confirm the numbers being paraded in front of us ourselves, the general consensus of the reviews online for the GeForce GTS 450 seems positive. We’ll be able to do our own benchmarks once we get our own review samples.
Also present during the launch were NVIDIA’s hardware partners, and we’ve been fortunate enough to catch a glimpse of their latest product offerings for the GeForce GTS 450 GPU. We’ve included a few product shots of the hardware on display, and will be able to review a few of them once the hardware samples gets to us. In the meantime, enjoy the pictures below of the different cards on display during the conference.
