Tried: GeForce GTX 550 Ti - bestbuy or fall?

Introductory

It's been a long time since the HD 5750 and HD 5770 were released. The card based on two juniper chips did not meet a direct counterpart until the Geforce GTS 450 was released. Although the production of the GTS 450 shown here was convincing, nevertheless, as the updated version of the well-known saying holds: you can't kill two horses with one card. The task of the Geforce GTX 550 Ti can be said to be relatively simple, since it has to push a product that is almost one and a half years old - in this market, this is already a "man's worth" of time - and for this reason, we compare its performance with the HD 6850. There is no doubt that the market in this segment is already highly oversaturated. Adding to the confusion is the appearance of the HD 6790, but rumor has it that the GTX 560 (yes, without the Ti mark) will also arrive soon. Be a buyer on your toes who is now completely adjusting to the current offer...

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti

Technology and guerrilla marketing

According to the signs, NVIDIA has taken the path of "considered progress", as it has made several new serial graphics cards with minimal changes. Instead of major developments, the Californian company started small and large marketing tricks.

This year, one of the high-end models of the GeForce3 family was the first to receive the Titanium distinction. Since then, "Ti" has been synonymous with uncompromising performance and an excellent price/value ratio.

The novelty is based on the GF116 GPU, which is a crease-stitched variant of the previously introduced GF106. It consists of four SM blocks, and within one SM, 48 CUDA cores work in the same way, for a total of 192 CUDA cores. The 32 texturing units, the three ROP blocks and the three 64-bit memory blocks, as well as the base area (240 mm2) and the number of transistors (1,17 billion), remain unchanged. Considering the floor space of the graphics processor, it can be seen that the comparison is not unfounded AMDWith Barts chip.

The presence of DirectCompute 5.0, PhysX, CUDA, DirectX 11, stereoscopic 3D technology remains unchanged, as does Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio signal transmission via HDMI.

There is, and there is not even 1 GB

In the case of its predecessor (GTS 450), 8 rasterization units have been deactivated to increase production yield, but a full-featured GPU is already running in the protagonist of our article. Here, the developers immediately faced a serious problem - and the department responsible for sales and marketing. In terms of competition, 768 MB of video memory projects very bad light on a card even in this segment.  

The CUDA-Z application: the GTS 450 on the left and the GTX 550 Ti on the right.

The GTX 550 Ti's memories are connected to the GPU via six 32-bit channels, which in practice means that six memory chips are required. For optimal utilization and even distribution of the load, it is advisable to use chips of the same size - in our case 128 MB - for all memory controllers. It is easy to calculate that this would "only" create a 768 MB card. Since NVIDIA insisted on 1GB, they used a mix of 128MB and 256MB chips. The GPU only accesses the latter chips through one memory controller (instead of three), so the bandwidth dropped to a third. In order to avoid further repetitions, it is worth looking at the figures below.

GF116

Source: anadtech

Of course, there is no problem as long as the video memory demand does not exceed the "magical limit", 768 MB. The unpleasant surprises begin when the "remaining" 256 MB of VRAM is also used, because with its bandwidth of 32832 MB/s, it can be considered more of a bottleneck. The slow, fluctuating performance that occurs in this case is guaranteed to worsen the gaming experience.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti

For the above reason, we advise our readers to use the Geforce GTX 550 Ti card in high resolution, with "increased attention" during games, especially if their VRAM demand is considered high. However, the problem should not be overmystified. A graphics processor of this level will probably run out of power before nearly 1 GB of VRAM becomes a limiting factor.