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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Marlin1975 - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
But over priced.If this was in the $100 area it be a much better buy. But the cheaper 460 is better right now.
Also you have the 450 in yoru graph as a 256bit bandwidth, not the 128bit it is.
vol7ron - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
I'm not usually an advocate of OCing gpus, but I'm curious how much more performance could be achieved. We know there's some room in the memory, how much more can the gpu/shaders really extract? While Zotac OCs, they normally don't max it out on air cooling, so a little testing would be nice :)slickr - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
Its a crap card.Its about $50 overpriced, its worse in consumption, noise and coolness than Nvidia's own 1 year old GTS 450.
So how can this be a good card? For the same price I can get a GTX 460 768mb that performs 20% faster and I can get cooler, quieter and less power draw card for $50 less in the 5770 and still get the same performance.
If you ask me this card is a rip off for consumers who don't know anything about graphic cards.
Aircraft123 - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
I really don't understand why nVidia is so concerned with these lower performing cards.Their own cards from TWO GENERATIONS AGO perform better then this "new" card.
I have a GTX275 it will perform equivalent or better than this new card and you can find it on a particular auction site for ~$100.
The only thing missing from my 275, is directX 11. Which unless you get a 470 or greater the card isn't powerful enough to run any dx11 stuff anyway.
I could also say the same for AMD considering the 4870 performs better than the 5770.
I am interested in the dual fermi card due out soon though. It will be interesting if/how they can beat the 6990 with lower power sonsumption/noise.
Anyhow good article.
Marlin1975 - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
The reason is the re-work I bet has a better yeild number, let alone more performance from the same chip with a new series number.So people think they are getting new cutting edge when its just a 4xx series chip re-worked.
Taft12 - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
In fairness, if we are considering dollars and cents your GTX275 has a TDP twice the 550 Ti, and probably eats up double or more at idle as well.jiffylube1024 - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
The GTX 275 costs a lot more to make than the Ti 550 (they couldn't mass manufacture the GTX 275 card at a $100 or even $150 pricepoint and hope to make a profit) and a GTX 275's that you could find for $100 today would either be old stock (meaning they're just clearing inventory) or a used card, meaning no profit for Nvidia whatsoever.It's pretty obvious that companies come out with these cards to occupy lower pricepoints... The problem is that, as you point out, they are often too cut-down and previous generation cards throttle them. It's a balance, and when they hit the right price/performance, magic happens (GTX 460), but they often miss the mark on other cards (GTS 450, Ti 550).
Even if you examine the Ti550 on paper, it stands no chance vs the GTX 460 -- it has 56% less shader power than the GTX 460 (336 shaders vs 192; a similar drop in texturing power) and not enough of a clockspeed advantage (900 MHz vs 675 MHz) to make up for that. At $150, the Ti550 is a total waste since you can find GTX 460's for $130 or less these days. It's going to take a fall below $100 for these cards to become worthwhile.
Nevertheless, if GTX 460 stock dries up, then without a Ti 550, Nvidia has a gaping hole below $250.
I think this has a lot to do with manufacturing costs -- it's not economical to keep making GTX 460's and sell them for ~$100. The Ti 550 has 66.7% the transitor count of the GTX 460, meaning a much cheaper die to manufacture.
Kiji - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
"Indeed the GTX 550 Ti is faster than the 5770 - by around 7% - but then the 5770 costs 36% more." - I think you mean "..36% less."Good review, and it's disappointing NVidia doesn't want to change their mentality.
Kiji - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
Nevermind, already fixed :)passive - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
At the end of page 5 you say that the 550 is ahead of the 5770 by 50%, and at 90% of the 6850. According to your graphs, both of these are very wrong (even when using the Zotacs numbers):23.1 (550) / 19.8 (5770) = 16.6%
23.1 (550) / 29.8 (6850) = 77.5%
What's weird is that immediately after you say how the 550 is beating the 450 by 30%, which is accurate, but further paints a pro-Nvidia picture.
I know we live in era of community edited content, but in order to prevent accusations of bias, you should really catch this before you publish.