EVGA’s GTX 550 Ti “free performance” evaluation
Just Cause 2
Just Cause 2 is a 2010 sandbox-style action video game by Swedish developer Avalanche Studios and Eidos Interactive and is the sequel to the 2006 video game, Just Cause. Just Cause 2 employs the Avalanche Engine 2.0 which an updated version of the engine used in the original and there are impressive visuals as it is made just for DX10.
It is set on the fictional tropical island of Panau in Southeast Asia. Rico Rodriguez returns as the protagonist who aims to overthrow the evil dictator “Baby” Panay and also to confront his former boss, rogue agent Tom Sheldon. The game play is similar to that of its predecessor in that the player is free to roam the huge open world without a need to focus on the storyline. The Just Cause 2 AI has been rewritten and it even includes dual-grappling hooks which give players the ability to tether unlimited objects to each other including the tethering of enemies to vehicles and to each other which works very well as one of your goals is to cause maximum chaos. It is a lot of fun!
Here are the maximum settings available to a GeForce card; the bottom two, the Bokeh Filter and GPU water simulation, are unavailable to Radeons and they are left off on all runs to give solid apples-to-apples comparisons for all of our tested video cards and we used the Dark Tower benchmark built into the retail game. 
First the benches at 2560×1600 with 8xAA:
Let’s look at the performance at 1920×1200 but now with 2xAA, as in our usual testing:
Again it takes the overclocked GTX 560 Ti to catch the stock HD 5770.
Here we see the HD 5770 run faster than the GTX 550 until it is overclocked.
I am just getting around to it but i must say very nice review apoppins! As always your vast selection of games and benchmarks is top notch. Its so complete. I know you used it a lot, but I wouldve liked to have seen 1680 x 1050 results for every game. You may have only skipped it when the 550ti was doing very well at 1920×1200 and thats fine. But i feel like 1680×1050 is intended for this card and although at times it can obviously do well at higher resolutions, the 1680×1050 should be the starting point in all the test.
Dont get me wrong, your review was great. I just think cards intended for a certain resolution often get reviewed in much higher resolutions which doesnt do them much justice. Your review does do the 550ti justice though, its very full and useful.
Thank-you!
Again, the reason for leaving 1680×1050 out came down to time. Or a lack of it.
I did try to compensate by finding settings that approached playability and I hope we can revisit the GTX 550 Ti in another article. I did some further testing of the GTX 550 Ti in the HD 6670/6570 launch article, in fact.
Galaxy is sponsoring our May contest – the prizes will include a GTX 550 Ti and a GTX 560 Ti.