The New Line Up

With the release of the GeForce GTX 550 Ti, this is how the new GeForce 500 series looks like :

The new GeForce GTX 550 Ti is targeted at gamers who play at the resolution of 1680 x 1050. Of course, you can use it to play at higher resolutions. It all depends on the game you play, and whether you enable any performance-sapping features like anti-aliasing.

What Did They Reload?

The GeForce GTX 550 Ti uses the GF116 GPU, which is very similar to the GeForce GTS 450's GF106 GPU. Both GPUs have 192 CUDA cores and 32 texture units, and are fabricated on the same 40 nm process technology. However, the new GF116 GPU features 24 ROP units (instead of just 16 in the GF106), automatically giving it 50% better pixel fillrate at the same clock speed.

The new GF116 GPU also boasts improved power efficiency, allowing NVIDIA to increase the clock speed while reducing leakages. They were able to run the GeForce GTX 550 Ti's GPU at 900 MHz, which is almost 15% faster than the GeForce GTS 450's GPU clock speed of 783 MHz. Yet, the GeForce GTX 550 Ti only uses slightly more power than the GeForce GTS 450 (116 watts versus 106 watts). In fact, NVIDIA claims that the GeForce GTX 550 Ti offers 20% better performance per watt compared to the GeForce GTS 450.

To further improve performance, they gave the new GeForce GTX 550 Ti a wider 192-bit memory interface (the GeForce GTS 450 only has a 128-bit interface) and ramped up the memory clock by 14%. NVIDIA claims this gives the GeForce GTX 550 Ti about 70% more memory bandwidth than the GeForce GTS 450.

Normally, increasing the width of the memory interface to 192-bits would require manufacturers to equip the GeForce GTX 550 Ti with either 768 MB or 1.5 TB of memory. However, the GF116's GDDR5 memory controller supports mixed-density memory chips. This allows NVIDIA to retain the GeForce GTS 450's memory size of 1 GB using the wider 192-bit interface.

Thanks to the increased core and memory clock speeds as well as the wider memory interface and higher number of ROP units, NVIDIA says that the GeForce GTX 550 Ti will be about 28% faster than the GeForce GTS 450 across a wide selection of DX9, DX10 and DX11 games. Let's take a look at those benchmark numbers.

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