NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 550 Ti: Coming Up Short At $150
by Ryan Smith on March 15, 2011 9:00 AM ESTCivilization V
Civilization 5 is the latest incarnation in Firaxis Games’ series of turn-based strategy games. Civ 5 gives us an interesting look at things that not even RTSes can match, with a much weaker focus on shading in the game world, and a much greater focus on creating the geometry needed to bring such a world to life. In doing so it uses a slew of DirectX 11 technologies, including tessellation for said geometry and compute shaders for on-the-fly texture decompression.
AMD recently picked up a performance boost in Civ 5, closing the gap NVIDIA opened earlier this year. Still, NVIDIA generally has quite an advantage here, which works out for the GTX 550’s favor.
Against the Radeon HD 5770 this translates to an 11% lead, while compared to the 6850 the GTX 550 comes as close as it ever will to the budget Barts, missing it by only 8%. For the rest of the NVIDIA lineup the gap is much closer to what we normally see, with the GTX 550 trailing the GTX 460 by 20%. Interestingly the GTX 550 doesn’t gain a ton over the GTS 450 here, and at only 10% we’re likely seeing what it means to be almost entirely geometry bound with no benefit to speak of from the ROPs or additional memory bandwidth.
Since being geometry bound is a simple matter of shader clocks however, the overclocked Zotac AMP gets a straightforward 10% performance increase due to its overclock. As a result for the first and only time in this article, we see a GTX 550 pull ahead of the 6850, even if it is by seven-tenths of a frame per second.
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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.