How Fast Is The GeForce GTX 550 Ti?

NVIDIA starts by showing how much more efficient the new GeForce GTX 550 Ti is, compared to the GeForce GTS 450. Here you can see a variety of DirectX 9, DirectX 10 and DirectX 11 games and the performance improvement per watt. Overall, NVIDIA claims that the GeForce GTX 550 Ti will have 20% better performance per watt over the older GeForce GTS 450.

Next, they displayed the GeForce GTX 550 Ti's overall performance boost over the GeForce GTS 450. Interestingly, they also showed how much of the performance increase was due to the clock speed increase and how much was due to the wider 192-bit memory interface. Overall, NVIDIA claims that the GeForce GTX 550 Ti is 28% faster than the GeForce GTS 450.

NVIDIA is specifically targeting the GeForce GTX 550 Ti at the AMD Radeon HD 5770. In this respect, NVIDIA claims that the GeForce GTX 550 Ti is anywhere from 18% to 50% faster than the Radeon HD 5770 in the latest games. This was partly attributed to NVIDIA's distributed tessellation architecture, where tessellation workload is spread across 4 dedicated PolyMorph Engines. The AMD Radeon HD 5770, on the other hand, uses a single dedicated unit for tessellation.

For gaming at 1920x1200, NVIDIA naturally recommends you pair two GeForce GTX 550 Ti in SLI mode. This would give you playable frame rates in even the most graphics-intensive games.

Of course, NVIDIA is assuming you "need" 4x anti-aliasing. IMHO, ditch anti-aliasing. Using the higher resolution gives you a free "anti-aliasing" upgrade. If you must play at 1920x1200 with anti-aliasing, go with a faster card like the GeForce GTX 560 Ti or the GeForce GTX 570. It's better and cheaper than using two GeForce GTX 550 Ti cards in SLI mode.

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