NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 550 Ti: Coming Up Short At $150
by Ryan Smith on March 15, 2011 9:00 AM ESTSTALKER: Call of Pripyat
The third game in the STALKER series continues to build on GSC Game World’s X-Ray Engine by adding DX11 support, tessellation, and more. This also makes it another one of the highly demanding games in our benchmark suite.
STALKER is quite memory intensive, and at higher resolutions we see even 1GB cards trail off in performance. So the biggest benefit to 1GB over 768MB in today’s games can be seen here, where the GTX 550 comes the closest it ever will to the GTX 460 768MB, reducing its performance deficit to 9%. It’s also another good showing against the also 1GB GTS 450, with a 23% gain.
Against the Radeon cards however NVIDIA does poorly, as this game largely favors AMD. The 3rd and final loss to the 5770 is here, this time by 3%; the 6850 has a 25% gap to close in the meantime. The difference ultimately is going to come down to quality – at 32fps the GTX 550 is playable, but most people are going to want to turn down something like AA in order to get the framerate above 40fps for a smoother experience.
As for the AMP’s factory overclock, once more it helps to close the gap. The AMP picks up 10%, but it’s still not enough to get above 40fps.
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silverblue - Wednesday, March 16, 2011 - link
And yet you leapt on him not once but twice about the same thing, despite the OP admitting his/her mistake.Really not constructive.
therealnickdanger - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
Perhaps I missed it, but does this carry all the A/V features of other 5xx cards or of 4xx cards?mosox - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
That card is competing with an ATI card that was released in...2009.In this review 6 out of the 10 games tested are TWIMTBP games favoring Nvidia. I guess there will never be transparent criteria for selecting the test games in here. Looking forward to see 110% of the games tested on Anand being TWIMTBP games.
medi01 - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
What's TWIMTBP?HangFire - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
The Way It (was) Meant To Be Played- Nvidia's program to encourage game developers to optimize for their video cards.Ryan Smith - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
Our criteria for picking new games is rather straightforward based on several factors: does the game make significant use of hardware features, is it challenging to high-end GPUs, is it possible to get consistent test results, is it popular enough that people play it/know what it is, and does it cover a suitable genre (we don't want all FPSs). We also take reader suggestions in to account - and indeed if you read the article at one point we were soliciting suggestions for a new UE3 game for the next refresh.At this point I honestly couldn't tell you what games in our lineup are TWIMTBP games. It's not something we factor in one way or another. The fact that NV invests as much money as it does in the program is naturally going to make it hard to avoid such games though, if that's what we intended to do.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
As a funny side note, DiRT 2 is an "AMD/ATI" game judging by the loading screens, yet it still favors NVIDIA in general. Ultimately, you buy cards for the performance, price, and power requirements. I'm not sure why you'd even suggest that we're trying to run all TWIMTBP games when our final recommendations are so heavily in favor of the AMD cards this round.nitrousoxide - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
I've been wondering that since the first time I saw Anandtech's graphics test. You are displaying so many data no matter what card you are testing. Is it even relevant to show 5970 or GTX580? That makes the graph less readable.fullback100 - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
Yeah I would rather see old video cards like 3850 and 8800GT than 5970 or GTX580. Really, how many people have top of ends cards? There would be a lot more people with video cards from like two generations ago.Taft12 - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
For starters you can't compare older cards on new games that use DX11. Next, most people are surprised to find out just how uncompetitive 2-generation-old cards are. Those 2 are probably in line with current GT440 or 5670. Many miles behind the slowest cards in these comparisons.