Sapphire Radeon HD 5450 512MB DDR3 Review

FarmVille Performance (Adobe Flash)

FarmVille may be one of those games which you either love or loathe but there is no denying its popularity considering at any one time there are over 20 million players tending to their farms and harvesting crops. While it may be fun, many players have expressed concerns over the fact that this simple web-based game demands such a massive amount of system resources. However, there is an initiative spearheaded by Adobe, NVIDIA and ATI to harness the parallel processing nature of modern GPUs to accelerate non-3D Flash-based applications.


With the slow transition from Flash 10 to Flash 11, there has been a number of Betas (10.1 Beta 1 and the newer 10.1 Beta 2) released that trumpet support for GPU acceleration in Flash-based environment. This GPU-based acceleration with ATI’s Stream and NVIDIA’s CUDA is mostly geared towards the streaming of high definition videos from services like YouTube and Hulu but it has the capability to make the transition into acceleration of Flash-based games as well. That’s where FarmVille comes into the equation. It is without a doubt one of the most demanding games on a modern CPU once your farm has grown to a certain size and can benefit quite a bit from GPU acceleration. Unfortunately, neither AMD nor NVIDIA make any mention of acceleration of Flash games in their press releases.


The Test


For this test we used an existing farm which had been built up to a high level and gradually manipulated objects, panned the camera, harvested crops and purchased items over a 10 minute test session. The CPU utilization was monitored and logged by Windows 7 Performance Monitor running a custom profile. In order to further tax our system and not introduce any additional variables into the equation, HyperThreading and Turbo Boost on the processor were disabled. Below, we see the differences between Flash 10 and Flash 10.1 Beta 2 with Hardware Acceleration enabled in the Flash control panel.


It goes without saying that at this time the majority of Flash games are not accelerated on the GPU but what was surprising is that the 10.1 Beta 2 seems to put even more load on the system than the older Flash 10 application.

That being said, there are some interesting things going on here so let’s begin with the star of today’s show: the Sapphire HD 5450 512MB. In a Flash 10.1 environment, it surprisingly looses out to the NVIDIA cards even though the actual amount of GPU load in all cases was less than 5%. On the other hand, it showed quite good performance when using Flash 10 where it beat out the NVIDIA cards by about 7%. This difference could be due to anything from driver overhead to programming incompatibilities but it should be interesting to see what happens in the coming months as the official released of Flash 11 draws close.

The GT 210 seems to have a few issues with Flash acceleration as well. Actually, Flash games don’t get a performance improvement in any way that we could see and once again Flash 10 seems to run more efficiently than the 10.1 betas.

Our huge surprise of the day comes with the GT 220 which for some reason showed about the same amount of CPU usage as the GT 210 in Flash 10 but actually saw a 3% improvement when using 10.1 Beta 2. This had us scratching our heads but according to GPU-Z’s load monitor, it did actually seem like the GT 220’s core was being utilized more often than the other GPUs. Whether it is a difference in driver writing or something else, at this time the GT 220 does seem to marginally help with Flash game acceleration.

Finally we come to the integrated graphics core on the i5 661 processor and it is pretty evident that it is only the CPU being utilized here. The 2% difference between Flash 10 and 10.1 is well within the margin of error especially considering the maximum CPU usage we saw in both cases was around 92% across all cores.