NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 550 Ti: Coming Up Short At $150
by Ryan Smith on March 15, 2011 9:00 AM ESTMass Effect 2
Electronic Arts’ space-faring RPG is our Unreal Engine 3 game. While it doesn’t have a built in benchmark, it does let us force anti-aliasing through driver control panels, giving us a better idea of UE3’s performance at higher quality settings. Since we can’t use a recording/benchmark in ME2, we use FRAPS to record a short run.
On a side note, for our next benchmark refresh we’ll likely replace it with a newer UE3 game. If any of you have any requests or suggestions, we’d like to hear them.
Mass Effect 2 is another strong showing for the GTX 550, particularly compared to the Radeon HD 5770. At this point we’re looking at a 20% performance boost, and against the GTS 450 it’s an even bigger 26% boost – clearly ME2 is memory bandwidth limited. The performance relative to the GTX 460 768MB also seems to confirm this, as this is the closest the GTX 550 gets to the GTX 460, coming within 9%. It doesn’t get close to clearing the 6850 however, which still beats the GTX 550 by 20%.
Notably, this is one of the few games where the AMP’s overclock isn’t as helpful, since the memory overclock isn’t as great as the core overclock. As a result the AMP’s advantage over a stock-clocked GTX 550 is only 6%. Nevertheless it gets within a hair of equaling the GTX 460 768MB, which is quite an accomplishment given the original difference in the number of CUDA cores.
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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.