Just in time for Crysis 2, Nvidia today announced the new GeForce GTX 550 Ti, promising to power through the 2023 alien-infested streets of New York at over 40fps at 1680?1050 with the 'Advanced' setting.
GeForce GTX 550 Ti is available in stores today for $149 USD and offers 28% faster gaming over the recent GeForce GTS 450, according to Nvidia. For any of the GeForce 8600 GT owners out there who have been waiting to upgrade, the GeForce GTX 550 Ti offers a 500% performance increase over their GPU and support for DirectX 11 gaming.
The GTX 550Ti features Nvidia's GF116 GPU. The GF116 is a slight process tweak over GF106, using a new selection of transistors in order to reduce leakage, increase clocks, and to improve the card?s performance per watt. The GTX 550 Ti features 192 CUDA cores paired with 24 ROPs, 32 texture units, 384KB of L2 cache, a 192-bit memory bus, and 1GB of GDDR5.
The GTX 550 Ti will be shipping at a core clock of 900MHz and a memory clock of 1026MHz (4104MHz data rate). NVIDIA puts the TDP at 116W.
Another big change with the GTX 550 Ti is its GDDR5 memory controller. Its memory controller supports what they call ?mixed density? memory chips. This allowed NVIDIA to put a 1GB frame buffer on this GPU using a 192-bit memory interface. Other GPUs that use a 192-bit memory interface are usually limited to 768MB of graphics memory. So for a GPU that is to have at least 1GB of total graphics memory ? it essentially has to have a 1.5GB frame buffer. This makes the GPU more expensive to produce and then of course a bit higher in price for the consumer. With the mixed density memory that NVIDIA is using on the GTX 550 Ti, they don?t have to boost the frame buffer to 1.5GB to ensure the full 1GB of memory graphics.
GeForce GTX 550 Ti is also packed with the latest GeForce GTX technologies including SLI, PhysX, 3D Vision, and NVIDIA Surround. And, starting today, users can get the new version of the 3D Vision wireless glasses kit on the NVIDIA Store, at a reduced price of $149 USD. Pricewise, it is positioned among the GeForce GTX 460 1GB or the Radeon HD 6850 ($160) and the GeForce GTX 460 768MB ($130).
