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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dmans - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
my 8800 gt is better than this thing.mapesdhs - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
Google for, "Ian PC tests", it's the 1st link that comes back. Scroll down the page
for the full list of results pages (I've done a whlole bunch). Voila, a mountain of
8800GT data for you to chew on. 8-) And much more to add!
Ian.
HangFire - Wednesday, March 16, 2011 - link
"lan PC tests". Hmm. I get a reviews.cnet.com link for a WiFi antenna.And, can you please stop spamming the comments?
mapesdhs - Wednesday, March 16, 2011 - link
I'm not spamming the comments, I'm providing real info to help people
out. Re the Google, it could be because being in the UK I'm forced
to use google.co.uk which may give different results to google.com
(probably does). Alas, nothing I can do about that (hmm, "try, "Ian SGI
UK" instead, that should bring up the right link). If you want to know
what I'm talking about though, send me a PM and I'll send you the refs
so you can see what I mean. People keep asking upgrade questions
which review articles do not or cannot answer, eg. those playing
older games, at lesser resolutions, with systems that don't have uber
CPUs, etc.. I've been working to provide the info that answers such
questions (have you?). That isn't spamming.
Ian.
HangFire - Wednesday, March 16, 2011 - link
>my 8800 gt is better than this thing.That would make it faster than the GTX260 as well. That's some 8800GT!
I love the value that my 8800GT provided, but it is sitting on the shelf now for a reason.
sheh - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
I'm not one to comment on this sort of things in general but I must in this case. Each instance of "in to" in the graphics hardware articles comes with a mental dissonance I have to resolve before reading can be resumed.http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/into.html
http://data.grammarbook.com/blog/definitions/into-...
Other than that, keep up the good work. :)
gammaray - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
I don't understand the logic behind the pricing of video cards nowadays.Low end video cards like this new 550ti should be below 100$
mid range video cards 150ish and
high end 200-250$ MAXIMUM
mapesdhs - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
An item is only ever worth what someone is willing to pay.
There are those with big budgets who are happy to pay $600+, hence products
to match such affordability exist and always will do.
If you had something to sell, would you let someone buy it for $200 if you had
a different customer who was happy to pay you $400? ;)
Such is the law of supply & demand. I deal with this every day with respect to
buying/selling used SGI items. Hobbyists assume old items should be cheap
because they're old and they don't want to pay much, but in reality commercial
demand for certain items extremely strong, so the real value is sometimes very
high. Same basic concept applies to anything really. A brand of chocolate
cookies my gf & I particularly like have gone up in price recently by quite a lot,
and I'm sure it's because they are popular. Demand rise = price rise.
In some parts of the world, the market for high-end consumers GPUs is quite strong.
Ian.
Will Robinson - Wednesday, March 16, 2011 - link
What a shame to soil the good reputation of past and present Ti cards on this dud.Belard - Wednesday, March 16, 2011 - link
"TI" is meaningless. Might as well mean "Total Idiot".If they took out the "TI", it would still be the same product. Its all marketing to get people to remember about the old $200 kick-ass 4200~4600 cards... before the GF 5800 debacle.
TI originally was about its manufacturing (so they say), but look back. There were no 4200 and 4200 TI, right? They divide the GF2-tech cards into 4x0MX and the state of the art into 4x00TI.
We'll soon see the return of MX, PRO and Ultras I think... hell, maybe even the "Geforce GTX ti 785 Ultra TNT" in 2012.