ATI Radeon HD 5450 On Linux

While the NVIDIA GeForce GT 220 costs about $20 USD more than the Sapphire Radeon HD 5450 512MB DDR2 graphics card, with Lightsmark the NVIDIA part was 2.5x faster on average. Even with the latest Catalyst 10.8 release, it continues to suffer from a peculiar regression where its performance drops at lower resolutions compared to running at the native resolution.

Even at 800 x 600, Unigine Sanctuary is not playable on the Radeon HD 5450. The NVIDIA GeForce GT 240 is the graphics card that is just on the brink of being playable with this older revision of the Unigine Engine.

Of course, the Radeon HD 5450 is clobbered even harder in Unigine Tropics with an average frame-rate less than 10 FPS using the proprietary Catalyst driver.