NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 550 Ti: Coming Up Short At $150
by Ryan Smith on March 15, 2011 9:00 AM ESTCrysis: Warhead
Kicking things off as always is Crysis: Warhead, still one of the toughest game in our benchmark suite. Even 3 years since the release of the original Crysis, “but can it run Crysis?” is still an important question, and for 3 years the answer was “no.” Dual-GPU halo cards can now play it at Enthusiast settings at high resolutions, but for everything else max settings are still beyond the grasp of a single card.
Though NVIDIA is primarily targeting the GTX 550 Ti towards 1680x1050 users, we’re including 1920x1200 to showcase games where the card is fast enough to handle that higher resolution at a playable framerate, or to show where it’s close to crossing the mark. However this is largely to satisfy our curiosity rather than to generate data from which to draw a comparison.
Out of our normal card lineup the GTS 450 is the slowest card we keep, so NVIDIA quite literally has nowhere else to go but up here. For the GTX 550 this means vaulting well past the GTS 450, giving us a 23% increase in performance; keep in mind that the theoretical improvement based on core and memory clocks alone is only 15%, so whenever we exceed that we are clearly seeing the benefits of the additional ROPs, L2 cache, and memory bandwidth afforded by enabling the 3rd memory controller. In any case at 32.2fps it’s playable, however Crysis is a demanding enough game that it makes much more sense to turn the game’s settings down some more before taking it on.
Meanwhile compared to AMD’s offerings the GTX 550 comes out ahead of the 5770 by half a frame per second, while the 6850 completely clears the field - –he GTX 550 only manages 72% of the 6850’s performance here. The situation compared to the GTX 460 768MB is much better, but still the GTX 550 is only 85% as fast.
As for the Zotac factory overclock, here we’re picking up 3%. This is curiously much lower than the theoretical advantage.
In terms of minimum framerates the GTX 550 ends up doing better. It ends up being ahead of the 5770 by nearly 10%, and against the 450 it beats it by 30%. However the GTX 550 still falls short of the 6850 by nearly 25%.
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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.