NVIDIA's GeForce GT 430: The Next HTPC King?
by Ryan Smith & Ganesh T S on October 11, 2010 9:00 AM ESTBattlefield: Bad Company 2
The latest game in the Battlefield series - Bad Company 2 - is another one of our new DX11 games and has been a smash hit at retail. It’s also surprisingly hard on our GPUs, enough so that we can say we found something that’s more demanding than Crysis. As BC2 doesn’t have a built-in benchmark or recording mode, here we take a FRAPS run of the jeep chase in the first act, which as an on-rails portion of the game provides very consistent results and a spectacle of explosions, trees, and more.
Bad Company 2 was an AMD showcase title for their DX11 cards, so it probably shouldn’t be a surprise that AMD does well here. In this case the 5570 has a 10fps lead and the 5670 extends that to 25fps, which leads to the GT 430 being playable, but the 5670 is buttery smooth here. As popular as the game is it’s hard to ignore the results; much like Crysis this is a barometer title of great importance.
120 Comments
View All Comments
n9ntje - Monday, October 11, 2010 - link
Sad to see Nvidia doesn't live up to expectations, while they want us to believe that they have a perfect HTPC card, it isn't.To most people, image quality counts. 3D is still a niche.
IceDread - Monday, October 11, 2010 - link
Yeap, it's always best if the competition is even, gives us the best prices.medi01 - Monday, October 11, 2010 - link
I am afraid market is too slow to react to nVidia having worse products, AMD has nowhere near market share that it deserves to have.We can't expect one player to dominate all the time. So when the underdog creates superior products, it should benefit from it. But this is not the case in GPU market, unfortunatelly, as nVidia still keeps much bigger market share, than AMD.
dnd728 - Monday, October 11, 2010 - link
I've tried quite a few ATI/AMD cards over the years, including the latest 5000 series, and to date not a single one of them worked right, i.e. without keep crashing Windows.It could be one reason.
electroju - Monday, October 11, 2010 - link
I agree and I have also used ATI and AMD graphics over the years. AMD graphics writes the worst software or drivers from a reputable company. I go with nVidia because I care for reliability and stability. I do not mind spending money on nVidia graphics because the money goes towards software development. The cost of AMD graphics is too low to provide enough for software development.Zoomer - Monday, October 11, 2010 - link
I have personally found nvidia cards to have inferior hardware quality. This was very evident from the time when quality dacs for vga mattered, and nvidia cards absolutely sucked at that. Further suboptimal decisions made their cards meh.Software wise, I thought nvidia's software quality peaked around the time of the detonators.
AmdInside - Monday, October 11, 2010 - link
DACs depended on the maker of the card. Quadro NVS cards which were made by NVIDIA were regarding as having excellent 2D image quality over analog display. Sadly a lot of NVIDIA partners used cheap DACs on some of their cards.mentatstrategy - Wednesday, October 13, 2010 - link
Nvidia Fanboi: I have used ati cards and they suck!ATI Fanboi: I have used nvidia cards and they suck!
heflys - Monday, October 11, 2010 - link
Hmmm....Haven't had a problem with ATi/AMD drivers thus far.duploxxx - Friday, October 15, 2010 - link
perhaps you need to read a bit more and see how many 1000's have been recently been affected by this awesome nvidia reliability and stability when they all had to throw away there graphic cards and laptops.