EVGA’s GTX 550 Ti “free performance” evaluation
Heaven 2.0 Unigine
Finally we come to our last benchmark, Heaven 2.5, on the Unigine engine. It uses DX11 and heavy tessellation which will strain any graphics card. At least two DX11 games based on Unigine are expected to be released this year. We use the setting for “extreme tessellation” and high shaders and we also set AF to 16x. We will tell you right now that this test chokes the GTX 590 at the highest settings and resolution so we do not run it at 2560×1600.
Even the GTS 450 had no trouble beating the HD 5770 with extreme tessellation and 2xAA at 1920×1200. Now let’s look at 1680×1050:
The GTX 550 Ti is clearly the fastest over the HD 5770 and even the older architecture HD 5770 at the extreme tessellation setting of this benchmark. However, this is a synthetic benchmark and we will withhold judgment until we play PC games using the Unigine engine.
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.