News Headlines
- Fri, May 24
- Time and Eternity Preview: All the Single Ladies
- Joe Danger 1 and 2 set to crash onto Steam later this year, Big Picture and Workshop support included
- Sony explains why Gran Turismo 6 is staying on PS3, cites PS3 potential and install base
- Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy HD is comign to iOS on May 30, prepare your Apple devices
- PlayStation 4 could reach Europe within 2013, according to UK newspaper ad
New Articles
Related Articles
Nvidia’s "Sniper" class of graphics cards offers gamers a nearly unmatched price to performance ratio, and effectively brought the Fermi architecture down to a very affordable price point. The first product to earn the Sniper title was the GTS 450 which came packed with 192 CUDA cores, 1024MB of GDDR5 memory and had a GPU clock speed of 800MHz, making it a force to be reckoned with in the $150 price range. The second Sniper product has just been released to the wild, and the specifications are very impressive for a graphics card under the $200 mark.
The new Sniper class card is the GTX 550 Ti, also known as the Sniper reloaded. This graphics card follows in the tradition of the GTS 450 by giving mainstream gamers an excellent option to play even demanding DirectX11 titles at a low price point. However, the GTX 550 Ti boasts 28% better in-game performance than the GTS 450 and also has an improved performance per-watt ratio of up to 20%.
The GTX 550 Ti achieves its additional performance by being the latest graphics card to undergo Nvidia’s transistor-level changes. This improves the overall power efficiently of the GPU and also reduces leakage. The new GPU is dubbed the GF-116 and with the internal optimizations, the core is able to clock up to 900MHz. In addition, Nvidia is using a brand new technology to improve the memory bandwidth. Essentially what Nvidia has done is engineer the GDDR5 memory controller to support mixed density memory chips, which allows the 550 Ti to use a 192-bit memory interface with 1GB FRAM buffer. This gives the GTX 550 Ti a memory bandwidth increase of 70% in comparison to the GTS 450, but without the additional cost of including larger capacity memory chips.
We are going to be looking at two GTX 550 Ti graphics cards. Both come with increased clocks speeds out of the box and use a custom design. One comes to us from MSI, while the other is a Palit design. Also, since we have two cards on hand we will be able to test the GTX 550 Ti in SLI to see how well they scale together.
(Image of Nvidia's reference GTX 550 Ti)
You mean it ONLY works with DX10?
As opposed to only looking good with DX10, like Crysis?
once everyone has a decent dx11 card, ill be a happy camper.
i mean, just cause 2 is the only dx10-exclusive game, and thats sad to me. id absolutely love to see at least dx10 as the minimum requirement in future titles.