NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 550 Ti: Coming Up Short At $150
by Ryan Smith on March 15, 2011 9:00 AM ESTMetro 2033
The next game on our list is 4A Games’ Metro 2033, their tunnel shooter released last year. In September the game finally received a major patch resolving some outstanding image quality issues with the game, finally making it suitable for use in our benchmark suite. At the same time a dedicated benchmark mode was added to the game, giving us the ability to reliably benchmark much more stressful situations than we could with FRAPS. If Crysis is a tropical GPU killer, then Metro would be its underground counterpart.
The GTX 550 ends up doing what the GTS 450 could not on Metro, and that’s cracking 30fps at 1680x1050. Realistically speaking however Metro is quite possibly the only thing more resource intensive than Crysis, and even though we’re down to “high” settings without anti-aliasing, this isn’t very playable. You’d have to go down in quality/resolution further still to get this FPS fluid.
Compared to other cards Metro normally gives AMD a slight edge. This results in the worst showing for the GTX 550 out of our benchmarks, with the 5770 of all things topping it by 5%. Compared to the 6850 the deficit is reduced however, with the GTX 550 coming in at 77% the performance. Performance relative to NVIDIA cards is rather consistent with BattleForge: 17% ahead of the GTS 450, but 18% behind the GTX 460 768MB.
Zotac’s overclock does manage to turn the tables some. The AMP still trails the 6850 and GTX 460, but at least it’s finally faster than the 5770.
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vedye - Thursday, March 17, 2011 - link
Thanks for pointing that out!! But the author will not respond to you. Anantech is already proven pro-Nvidia. If I were them, I would ignore ur post as well. Just keep pretending.Demon-Xanth - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
From the consumer standpoint, why would I get a 550 over a 460? I read through this and can't come up with a single reason.Gami - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
there's no point in getting it.. they need to eliminate the stock of the 400 series first, from all outlets, so that this thing would actually have a chance to be even thought of being bought.Taft12 - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
Soon that reason will be "the GTX 460 768MB is not available", but that is not yet true, and indeed there is no reason to buy this card.qwertymac93 - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
how did they get 1GB of memory with a 192-bit bus? Are you sure its not 768MB?Demon-Xanth - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
There's a whole page on that. Plus many comments on other pages.z3nny - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
Yeah, RTFA.Lolimaster - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
So after near 1.5years HD5770 is the better buy for mid value customers. Right now in many places HD6850 costs less than the 460 1GB and performs better (even more with the new 11.4pre and future (mejolnir "driver" updates)qwertymac93 - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
never mind, read the next page... And now i wish you guys had an edit function...z3nny - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
It would have helped if you RTFA first before posting like a fool.