EVGA’s GTX 550 Ti “free performance” evaluation

3D Vision Testing

We received our 3D Vision Kit from ASUS/Nvidia the same day that we received our GTX 590 a couple of weeks ago. The kit is pictured as shown below:

The 23 inch 1920×1080 ASUS 120Hz display is beautiful and the screen is extra-bright for 3D Vision.  One thing you will notice is that the game is darker in 3D then in 2D and your LCD’s brightness or gamma needs to be turned up to compensate.  We have spent a little more time playing our favorite games in 3D Vision and we generally have great news to report.

Even older games not made for 3D can work very well with the added dimension of depth.  Serious Sam, Second Edition (2010) is an example of where it works well if you don’t crank up the depth too much.  Aiming is good and the monsters attacks are even more off the wall and fun with the added dimension.

Here are the results of our benching with 3D Vision enabled versus 2D with the GTX 550 Ti. There is a significant performance hit because each frame is rendered twice – once for the left eye and once for the right. We will go into much more detail in an upcoming review of 3D Vision.  We tested and played two games – Batman Arkham Asylum and Resident Evil 5 at our display’s native resolution of 1920×1080 at 120Hz.

All of the games were played with maximum settings with a single EVGA-clocked GTX 550 Ti. Motion Blur is left off and AA is set to 2x.

Here are Batman Arkham Asylum 3D Vision results:

3D Vision is quite impressive as you now have another dimension of depth to immerse you even more into your game.  Best of all, as you can see it is completely playable on a single GTX 550 Ti.  Batman is described as 3D Vision “ready” and there are no oddities in playing this game whatsoever in the couple of hours this editor spent playing it.  There is no eyestrain, headaches or irritation to report as depth can be set easily and playing at 120Hz reduces flickering to nearly zero.  3D is a way to immerse the gamer into the action much better than 2D.

One gripe has been addressed about getting back to 2D quickly – simply press the front of the emitter and you can effortlessly switch between 2D and 3D as sometimes you have to read menus that are in 2D.

Resident Evil 5 is a little more resource-hungry than Batman and we would recommend dropping setting further than what we used.  We did not play the game for very long (as we did with Batman) but will give you our performance results with a single EVGA-clocked GTX 550 Ti at 1920×1050@120Hz. Motion Blur is left off and AA is set to 2x while other settings are completely maxed out.

Here are Resident Evil 5 3D Vision performance testing results:

3D Vision aims for 60 frames per second; 30 per eye. Triple buffering is locked on in the drivers and cannot be disabled. We shall cover this in great detail in our 3D Vision evaluation article coming up in about a month. In the meantime, stay tuned for more 3D Vision results in upcoming evaluations.