NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 550 Ti: Coming Up Short At $150
by Ryan Smith on March 15, 2011 9:00 AM ESTClosing Thoughts
This is ultimately an underwhelming launch for NVIDIA, but perhaps it’s best we first start with the positives.
The GTS 450 was the first Fermi launch that didn't result in some immediate fanfare for NVIDIA. With performance treading between a Radeon HD 5750 and 5770, the GTS 450 didn’t look good. So if they could be a “most improved” award for a GPU, GF116 and the GTX 550 Ti would most certainly get it. Even though all NVIDIA did was enable a 3rd memory controller and ramp up the clocks, it’s enough to increase performance by 20% - at other segments of the market we regularly settle for less. With these improvements the GTX 550 Ti is finally almost consistently ahead of the Radeon HD 5770.
So what’s the problem? The same problem NVIDIA normally runs in to: pricing. The GTX 550 Ti seems destined to sell based on NVIDIA’s name and market presence more than it will sell based on performance characteristics. Not having a reference card muddles our results some, but ultimately it’s clear that AMD’s pricing has caught NVIDIA flat-footed.
Indeed the GTX 550 Ti is faster than the 5770 - by around 7% - but then the GTX 550 Ti costs 36% more. At the other end of the spectrum is the 6850, which is 7% more expensive on average for 25% better performance. Even the GTX 460 768MB is going to gnaw at NVIDIA here so long as it’s still on the market; it’s 15% faster and yet it’s $20 cheaper. It’s with a dash of Alanis Morissette irony that while having so-so graphical performance the GTX 550 is a remarkable compute card compared to similar AMD cards, but at the same time a CUDA memory bug sliped by before the product shipped.
In these situations NVIDIA reminds me of Intel in the sub-$200 market before Sandy Bridge was released: gross margin first, competition second. AMD is quite willing to cut prices to the bone, NVIDIA is not. As a result on these lower-end products AMD has quite the performance lead for the price. This of course is NVIDIA’s choice, but so long as they choose to go about pricing products this way they’re going to play catch-up to AMD.
In the end the GTX 550 Ti just isn’t a compelling product at $149. At that price you’re much better served by ponying up the extra $10 to pick up a 6850 for much better performance – and if the Zotac GTX 550 Ti AMP is similar to other GTX 550 Ti cards – lower power consumption and less noise. Alternatively the GTX 460 768MB is an absolute steal while it’s still available.
Meanwhile partners like Zotac are left in a rough spot. At $169 $155 the GTX 550 Ti AMP closes the performance gap with the 6850 by some, and at $5 more than a stock clocked GTX 550 Ti is quite a good deal for 10% better performance. But ultimately it's only $5 less than a notably better performing card, the 6850. However the fact that so many partners are doing overclocked cards speaks well of GF116’s overclockability. More significantly it’s quite remarkable that these overclocked GTX 550 Ti’s can get so close to the GTX 460 768MB – a card with a much bigger GPU with many more functional units to work with. With these factory overclocks, the GTX 550 Ti could almost be a decent replacement for the GTX 460 768MB. Pricing is the enemy however – these guys can only lower prices if NVIDIA lets up on the $149 MSRP for the stock clocked GTX 550 Ti.
Finally, we certainly haven’t forgotten about NVIDIA’s interesting memory arrangement with the GTX 550 Ti. It’s a shame that they won’t tell us more about how they’re interleaving memory accesses on this unique design, but hopefully they’ll open up in the future. It’s something we’re definitely going to revisit once the CUDA memory bug is dealt with, and hopefully at that time we’ll be able to learn more about how NVIDIA is accomplishing this. If this is the start of a long term change to memory layout by NVIDIA, then getting to better understand how they’re interleaving memory accesses here will be all the more important to understanding future products.
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Soldier1969 - Wednesday, March 16, 2011 - link
Poor mans card, come back when you get at least a 580 or better...valenti - Thursday, March 17, 2011 - link
Ryan, can you explain where the nodes per day numbers come from?I spend a fair amount of time hanging around folding sites, I can't think of anybody else that uses the nodes per day metric. Most people use PPD (points per day), easily gathered from a F@H statistics program such as HFM.net
I'm unsure how to convert nodes/day to PPD, if that is possible. In actual practice, I find that a 450 card nets almost 10,000PPD, while a 460 gets about 12,000. I prefer the 450, after taking into effect price and power needs.
You might want to search on "capturing a WU" to read about how to copy a protein's work files, allowing you to run the same protein for each card.
suddenone - Thursday, March 17, 2011 - link
How good this card is depends on what monitor you plan on using. Anyone that has a small monitor and plans to keep it for at least three years might be happy with this card. I am puzzled to see fps over 60 on a standard 60hz monitor. My gtx 460 ran fine until I upgraded to a 24 inch 1080p monitor. I sold the card on ebay and bought the gtx 570( big gun). The gtx 570 can run any of my games at over 30fps min with all effects at maximum. Peace out.ol1bit - Thursday, March 17, 2011 - link
I bought 2 460's 6 months ago it so. For 149 each, and they beat the 550 in every catigory.This is a bad launch by Nivida. Old product is faster at same price or lower.
meatfestival - Monday, March 21, 2011 - link
Not sure if it's already been posted, but although it does indeed use id Tech 4, Raven wrote a custom DX9 renderer for it.The multiplayer component (based on the Quake Wars fork of id Tech 4) is on the old OpenGL renderer.
ClagMaster - Friday, March 25, 2011 - link
The GF116 has much optimized and improved performance over that of the GT-450 it is destined to replace.However, the GTX-550 Ti is a low-end replacement for the GT-450 and is priced to much. I wished nVidia called it the GT-550 and reserved the Ti designation for something truly high performance.
For $20 more, I can get a ATI-6850 that gives me 25% more performance for 10% less power consumption.
chrcoluk - Friday, October 21, 2011 - link
I think people are been very harsh on the card.its slower than the older 460 on these benchmarks but the gap isnt a gulf and in addition peopel are completely discounting the power factor. The major problem with graphics cards today is they use too much power, intel have managed to reduce power load whilst increasing performance, yet nvidia cant do the same.
Also no considerations taken on what people are upgrading from, I currently have an 8800GT and am only considering upgrading, a 550 TI would double performance whilst using a little more power on load over the 8800GT and only a 3rd on idle. Buying a 460 would give me a bigger performance boost but I need to connect a 2nd power cable (wtf???) and it uses significantly more power than the 550, about 50% more. so for watts vs performance the 550 beats the 460. But it seems people on here and most other sites consider power consumption as 0 importance, maybe they dont pay their own power bills?
The 550 TI will have many sales because nvidia know most people dont upgrade every year but more likely 3+ years frequency so the 550TI doesnt have to beat the 460 it just has to be significantly better than DX9 and DX8 cards at a good price point whilst also not needing someone to maybe buy a fatter psu as well (not considered here when comparing prices). The 550TI will double my current performance, and I guess the 460 1 gig would be about an extra 20% or so on top of that. Amount of video ram is also important, texture heavy games will saturate 768meg so in those scenarios the 550 is a better choice than the 768 460 model.
xKerberos - Tuesday, January 17, 2012 - link
Oh finally someone who makes some sense! In my country, GTX460s are more expensive than GTX550 Tis and my overclocked Gigabyte 9800gt was struggling to run Battlefield 3 so I picked up an MSI GTX550 Ti with 1gb of ram and factory overclocked. It runs BF3 like a dream at high. And seeing how it munches on VRAM, I'm surprised how people with 768mb cards run that game.Granted I have a tiny 1280x1024 Dell UltraSharp 19" monitor so I don't need a high end card to max games out. My 9800gt was doing a fine job until BF3 came out. I also had to fork out for 8gb of ddr2 ram to run that beast properly.
Anyway what I like about my new card is it was cheap (half the price of GTX560, although at half the performance), it runs very cool (36C on idle in a warm tropical country! max 60C on load), very quiet and it does the job. I won't have to upgrade for a while yet!
UpStateMike - Wednesday, February 22, 2012 - link
I have to agree with this. About a month ago I began the project build to replace an ancient dinosaur that was maxed out and tired.I kept my good 630W ps, a 24" led 1080p viewsonic monitor, and a 9800 gtx card that I figured I could use in the new build.
I started with a new case - rosewill challenger, and build around an i5 Sandy Bridge 2500k put into asus p8z68-vpro mb. I have 8gb of gskill ddr3 1333 at the moment.
Now that this is all up and running, instead of my old system being the performance bottleneck of the video card, the card is now the bottleneck.
I began by trying to cheap out and stay at $80 range, and OC the cards mentioned here, but I liked the lower power use (I'm a medium gamer but I wanted a PC that could handle any game I want to get in the future) of the 550ti and although I'm at $120 for this card, my guess is when I go for my next upgrade phase in about 6 months or so, I can wait for a good deal to come along and get another one to SLI and another 8gb of memory.
So for me, this is a big upgrade that I can build on to SLI and get to where I should be happy for the next couple of years. I do more photography editing and whatnot so this greatly helps me with that and I can still game as I get some time. I can appreciate that the differences are minor for anyone that has bought a card in the last year, but coming from a 9800gtx I'm very happy.