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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Ryan Smith - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
Our experience with desktop Linux articles in the past couple of years is that there's little interest from a readership perspective. The kind of video cards we normally review are for gaming purposes, which is lacking to say the least on Linux. We could certainly try to integrate Linux in to primary GPU reviews, but would it be worth the time and what we would have to give up in return? Probably not. But if you think otherwise I'm all ears.HangFire - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
All I'm asking for is current and projected CUDA/OpenCL level support, and what OS distro's and revisions are supported.You may not realize it, but all this GPGPU stuff is really used in science, government and defense work. Developers often get the latest and greatest gaming card and when it is time for deployment, middle end cards (like this one) are purchased en masse.
Nividia and AMD have been crowing about CUDA and OpenCL, and then deliver spotty driver coverage for new and previous generation cards. If they are going to market it heavily, they should cough up the support information with each card release, we shouldn't have to call the corporate rep and harangue them each and every time.
Belard - Wednesday, March 16, 2011 - link
Someone who already has a GF450 would be a sucker to spend $150 for a "small-boost" upgraded card.When upgrading, a person should get a 50% or better video card. A phrase that never applies to a video card is "invest" since they ALL devalue to almost nothing. Todays $400~500 cards are tomorrows $150 cards and next weeks $50.
So a current GF450 owner should look at a GF570 or ATI 6900 series cards for a good noticeable bump.
mapesdhs - Wednesday, March 16, 2011 - link
Or, as I've posted before, a 2nd card for SLI/CF, assuming their mbd
and the card supports it. Whether or not this is worthwhile and the
issues which affect the outcome is what I've been researching in recent
weeks. Sorry I can't post links due to forum policy, but see my earlier
longer post for refs.
Ian.
HangFire - Friday, March 18, 2011 - link
I wasn't really suggesting such an upgrade (sidegrade). I was just saying that each generation card at a price point and naming convention (450->550) should have at least a little better performance than card it replaces.Calabros - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
tell me a reason to NOT prefer 6850 over this7Enigma - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
So basically this is my 4870 in a slightly lower power envelope with DX11 features. I'm shocked the performance is so low honestly. Thanks for including the older cards in the review because it's always nice to see I'm still chugging along just fine at my gaming resolution (1280X1024) 19".7Enigma - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
Forgot to add, which I bought in Jan 2009 for $180 (Sapphire Toxic 512meg VaporX, so not reference design)mapesdhs - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
You're the target audience for the work I've been doing, comparing cards at
that kind of resolution, old vs. new, and especially where one is playing older
games, etc. Google for, "Ian PC Benchmarks", click the 1st result, then select,
"PC Benchmarks, Advice and Information". I hope to be able to obtain a couple
of 4870s or 4890s soon, though there's already a lot of 4890 results included.
Ian.
morphologia - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
Why in the name of all that's graphical would you use this Noah's Ark menagerie of cards but leave out the 4890? It doesn't make sense. If you're going to include 4000 series cards, you must include the top-of-the-line single-GPU card. It's proven to be quite competitive even now, against the lower-level new cards.