Related Articles

Quake Wars: Enemy Territory

Next up, we have Quake Wars. For the HD3450, we thought this game would run okay -- because even though Quake Wars came out fairly recently (in the Fall of 2007), it utilizes an engine that has been walking the block for some time now. In the realm of game performance, it is absolutely vital to have a reasonable steady framerate in order to play a FPS online at all. Where in some games you can get away with a little bit of chop here, and little bit of lag there, in an FPS, if you are playing with framerates in the low 20's consistently -- well, you are going to get whacked.

I'm pretty familiar with this game, having written a performance guide on it back in the game's beta days, so it didn't take long to find an optimum setting: with the diffuse, bump, and specular sliders all on 'full', all details on 'normal', shadows, soft particles and smooth foliage 'on', the game was playable at 1024 x 768. The average was about 28 FPS -- only when vehicles and many effects were on screen did the framerate really plummet -- but when there wasn't much going on on-screen, framerates went up to the high '30s.

You could reasonably play Quake Wars online and still be competitive with the HD 3450, which is honestly better than I expected from this card. If you set the shader level to 'low' you should be fine.

(Once again, keep in mind that the FPS is lower in this video because of the recording going on. This is about an average of 21 FPS in here. The video is more to give you an idea of what kind of image quality you can expect.)

Bioshock

Bioshock is one of the games that I could imagine some non-hardcore, casual PC gamer could justify picking up a HD 3450 just to play. No doubt many of hours have been sunk into the underwater world of Bioshock, and no doubt just as many people decided to pass on the game for lack of compatible computer hardware.

With the Diamond HD 3450, Bioshock ran fairly well, with all the special graphics options off, and actor and texture details set to medium, at a 1024x768 resolution. We would average a FPS of about 25, which put the HD 3450 just over the line separating a good experience from a bad experience.

Not to say the game would not be more enjoyable running on a HD 3870 -- but it was playable, so for the price of the HD 3450, the performance can be considered quite good.

Unreal Tournament 3

The engine that powers Unreal Tournament 3 can be considered the opposite of the one that powers Crysis: Where Crysis is unforgiving when it comes to hardware requirements, Unreal Tournament 3 runs quite zippy on a modest machine (let's say a 1.8 GHz Core 2 Duo, with a 7600 GT for instance.) Where Crysis has a resource-hungry  engine that demands the power of  a Cray super-computer connected to a nuclear reactor to break the 50 FPS barrier on  'High' settings, Unreal would hardly tax a powerful system (2.5+ GHz with a 8800 GT say) on the maximum detail settings, running at an insanely high resolution.

So we had high expectations for the potential of playing the game with the Diamond HD 3450.

Once again, performance stood just over the 'acceptable' line -- which is to say, the HD 3450 did pretty well, all things considered. With a texture detail of '2' and world detail of '2' (out of a maximum '6'), and at resolution of 1024x768, the game looked absolutely fine, and framerates kept steady in the low 30's. When things quite got quite busy -- say, if there was a ship flying around and lots of guys jumping everywhere -- things would drop to 25, but remained playable. Sure, not enough frames to start your pro-gamer career off to a bang, but if you were a once-in-a-while gamer with your $50 HD 3450, you could have some fraggin' fun online with Unreal Tournament 3.

This FRAPs recording made the game suffer about a 4 FPS hit, so it gives you a very good idea of what playing on a HD 3450 is like: