NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti

[curaga]

Look forward to the huge nvidia comparison then.

[lexa2]

Thanks for the info. Unfortunately I have this problem every time I feel like upgrading which makes it so painful. tomshardware used to have all the video cards across several generations in the same charts which made it a lot easier to tell if one card was approximately twice as fast or ten times as fast as another.

You are welcome. Yeah, that's definitely a problem with hardware review sites. Personally I'm not a big fan of Tom's Hardware as there's an almost perfect Russian language hw-review site ixbt.com (I believe that they have English language version at http://ixbtlabs.com/). This site had been online since almost forever (I remember using it back in 1995 - at that times it had been called ixbt.stack.net) and years ago they had been regularly publishing hw comparisons over several hw generations. It was very handy to get known how much times faster is the brand-new GeForce 3 Ti 200 card in comparison to TNT2 Ultra I have installed in my PC. Later on they had switched into monthly "i3DSpeed" reviews schedule so it became a bit difficult to do direct comparisons. But it's still possible but require a bit of hand-work to be done.

For example it wasn't a surprise for me that 550 Ti would be approx on par with GTS-250, as there were tests published on i3DSpeed with direct comparison of GTS-250 to GTX-450 and then there were tests with direct comparison between GTX-450 and GTX-550 Ti. So the all I had to do is to proceed with a three-way compare. Needless to say that I would be happier in case iXBT and/or Phoronix would publish direct comparisons for the last three generation of GPUs so I wouldn't be forced to do all that hand-work in order to compare.

[grotgrot]

long time user of GTS-250 until recently had done an "upgrade" to the GTX 550 Ti. Speed difference between this cards turned out to be negligible.

Thanks for the info. Unfortunately I have this problem every time I feel like upgrading which makes it so painful. tomshardware used to have all the video cards across several generations in the same charts which made it a lot easier to tell if one card was approximately twice as fast or ten times as fast as another.

[FreeBooteR69]

Catalyst works fine. I have been running Radeon cards on linux since about 2008. Never had a problem. At this point, it is just people living in the past about the Catalyst driver. IMO The Radeon HD 6770 is a much better deal, even on linux.

I've just recently moved back to using GeForce because Nvidia drivers are far superior to the Catalyst drivers. I did a year with ATI and will never touch another ATI video card again. My advice to any GNU/Linux gamer is to stay away from ATI cards. Especially if you want to run any games using wine. ATI have never been able to write a decent driver, and i think they never will.

If your just a web surfer or don't use any software requiring 3d, you won't notice much difference, because your not actually asking your card to do much.

[lexa2]

It would helpful to also mention noise. This is especially important with the fan noise venting directly out the back of the case. My existing Nvidia card is normally silent for desktop use, but makes a loud screeching easily noticeable from another room when playing modern games as the fan spins up to full speed.

I had recently changed my GPU from GTS-250 1Gb from Gigabyte (so-called ultra-durable series, equipped with nice cooler by Zalman and solid-state capacitors) to GeForce GTX 550 Ti 1Gb from Zotac. Both cards were fab-overclocked, don't remember exactly what were the clocks for GTS-250. Zotac GTX 550 Ti I has runs with 1GHz base frequency which gives 2200MHz for VRAM (4400MHz effective DDR rate) and 2000MHz for GPU cores. When it comes to noise it isn't an extreme with 550 Ti but still it's pretty noticeable when GPU cooler runs at full throttle. I would recommend installing non-stock GPU cooler from respected vendor like Zalman in order to get more silent gaming experience.

My biggest problem with Nvidia (I won't use ATI/AMD) is how hard it is to compare between generations. For example I have an 8800GT in my computer and would be happy to upgrade to a newer card if I could find out approximately what the functional and performance difference is to cards available now. Unfortunately benchmarks (including this one) operate on cards from roughly the same generation so they aren't of any help. I did spot an Nvidia slide the other day where it implied current cards are twice as fast as mine, but twice is not anywhere near enough to convince me to upgrade.

You write that you've got 8800GT, which is then had been re-branded as 9800 and a bit later had been rebranded to GTS-250. Essentially 8800, 9800 and GTS-250 are all just the same GPU. As I had written above I've been a long time user of GTS-250 until recently had done an "upgrade" to the GTX 550 Ti. Speed difference between this cards turned out to be negligible. In older apps like Q3A or HL2 under Wine I got less FPS than I've been getting with GTS-250. On the other hand apps which use complicated shaders (especially tessellation ones) runs way faster on GTX 550 Ti. Cuda calculations also seem to run faster on 550 Ti. In my case it makes sense as I'm doing some OpenGL programming as a hobby and like to use Cuda for doing intensive calculations. For ordinary gamer it wouldn't make sense to change his fast 8800/9800/GTS-250 to the GTX 550 Ti as it would result in performance drop in most of the available linux games. Same stands for gaming under Wine - it is very likely that FPS would regress there too as wined3d implementation doesn't use any OpenGL3.x/4.x fancy computation features that may bring the difference and improve FPS numbers on "Tesla" and "Fermi" GPUs.

[DanL]

I have an 8800GT in my computer and would be happy to upgrade to a newer card if I could find out approximately what the functional and performance difference is to cards available now. I did spot an Nvidia slide the other day where it implied current cards are twice as fast as mine, but twice is not anywhere near enough to convince me to upgrade.

I'd say an 8800GT is roughly equivalent to a GTX 560 in terms of bang for buck. Modern Nvidia cards will have more video acceleration features (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_PureVideo ) and
they will also support OpenGL 4.x (and DirectX11) with the main feature there being tessellation. Whether any of that stuff is compelling enough to upgrade is your call.

[LinuxID10T]

Yeah, I was very happy to see a conclusion, even if I didn't agree with it. Calling the 550 Ti a disappointment because it loses benchmarks to a RadeonHD 6770 doesn't do it justice IMO. I think it's fair to say that most people looking at cards in this price class will have a moderate interest in gaming. Assuming that fglrx/Catalyst will give the user an overall gaming experience equal to the Nvidia blob doesn't seem right to me. Catalyst still has a way to go in this regard, although I do see more reports of satisfied users than I did even a couple years ago. (BTW, I'd like to think that I'm not biased in favor of Nvidia, as I own mostly AMD cards because I support their open-source strategy).

Catalyst works fine. I have been running Radeon cards on linux since about 2008. Never had a problem. At this point, it is just people living in the past about the Catalyst driver. IMO The Radeon HD 6770 is a much better deal, even on linux.

[dizzey]

i have done that upgrade

It would helpful to also mention noise. This is especially important with the fan noise venting directly out the back of the case. My existing Nvidia card is normally silent for desktop use, but makes a loud screeching easily noticeable from another room when playing modern games as the fan spins up to full speed.

My biggest problem with Nvidia (I won't use ATI/AMD) is how hard it is to compare between generations. For example I have an 8800GT in my computer and would be happy to upgrade to a newer card if I could find out approximately what the functional and performance difference is to cards available now. Unfortunately benchmarks (including this one) operate on cards from roughly the same generation so they aren't of any help. I did spot an Nvidia slide the other day where it implied current cards are twice as fast as mine, but twice is not anywhere near enough to convince me to upgrade.

I upgraded my geforce 8800GT 640mb that is one of the first 8800 serie's card.
I wanted to be able to play starcraft 2 in wine at 1080p resolution and the game was faster with the geforce 550.
For me the upgrade was worth it but then i did not have a huge requirment list.

[DanL]

What, what is this? There was... Gasp some commentary to go along with benchmarks... YAY!

Yeah, I was very happy to see a conclusion, even if I didn't agree with it. Calling the 550 Ti a disappointment because it loses benchmarks to a RadeonHD 6770 doesn't do it justice IMO. I think it's fair to say that most people looking at cards in this price class will have a moderate interest in gaming. Assuming that fglrx/Catalyst will give the user an overall gaming experience equal to the Nvidia blob doesn't seem right to me. Catalyst still has a way to go in this regard, although I do see more reports of satisfied users than I did even a couple years ago. (BTW, I'd like to think that I'm not biased in favor of Nvidia, as I own mostly AMD cards because I support their open-source strategy).

[DanL]

It would helpful to also mention noise. This is especially important with the fan noise venting directly out the back of the case.

Noise (in terms of irritation of the user) is a really difficult thing to measure. Even reviewers with the capability to take accurate quantitative measurements in dBA (like SPCR) can't always make definitive product recommendations. Asking a Linux review site run by one man (whose primary interest is benchmarking) to give you noise recommendations seems like barking up the wrong tree.