NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 550 Ti: Coming Up Short At $150
by Ryan Smith on March 15, 2011 9:00 AM ESTCivilization V
Civilization 5 is the latest incarnation in Firaxis Games’ series of turn-based strategy games. Civ 5 gives us an interesting look at things that not even RTSes can match, with a much weaker focus on shading in the game world, and a much greater focus on creating the geometry needed to bring such a world to life. In doing so it uses a slew of DirectX 11 technologies, including tessellation for said geometry and compute shaders for on-the-fly texture decompression.
AMD recently picked up a performance boost in Civ 5, closing the gap NVIDIA opened earlier this year. Still, NVIDIA generally has quite an advantage here, which works out for the GTX 550’s favor.
Against the Radeon HD 5770 this translates to an 11% lead, while compared to the 6850 the GTX 550 comes as close as it ever will to the budget Barts, missing it by only 8%. For the rest of the NVIDIA lineup the gap is much closer to what we normally see, with the GTX 550 trailing the GTX 460 by 20%. Interestingly the GTX 550 doesn’t gain a ton over the GTS 450 here, and at only 10% we’re likely seeing what it means to be almost entirely geometry bound with no benefit to speak of from the ROPs or additional memory bandwidth.
Since being geometry bound is a simple matter of shader clocks however, the overclocked Zotac AMP gets a straightforward 10% performance increase due to its overclock. As a result for the first and only time in this article, we see a GTX 550 pull ahead of the 6850, even if it is by seven-tenths of a frame per second.
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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.