Nvidia GTX 550 Ti

Streamworks Audio wrote on 6/27/2012, 9:36 AM

Hi folks,

I am sure there are loads of discussions ongoing about which GPU offers great performance. I am wondering if there are any opinions on the GTX 550? I am looking at something like this...

http://ncix.com/products/?sku=60804&vpn=02G%2DP3%2D1559%2DKR&manufacture=eVGA&promoid=1067

It is not the 'beast' from the current Nvidia line up... but it has a clock speed of 900mhz beats my GPU (Nvidia 210 589mhz)! Currently my GPU is not even able to play 1080i video in real time (with no edits, and full preview quality), I have to disable GPU acceleration and let the CPU do it.

This summer I have a few large projects and I am thinking before I start them up, I would like to add a decent (read, not the 'best') upgrade to my system to help with previews at least. Any help with rendering the time before preview would be a bonus.

Opinions?

Cheers,
Chris

Comments

Guy S. wrote on 6/27/2012, 12:54 PM

I have a 550 ti at home and it works well. At work I've tried three cards recently:

GTX 460 ($250 - original card in system)
GTX 680 ($500)
Quadro 4000 ($1k)

GTX 680 - has about 6x the processing power compared to GTX 460 but yielded little to no performance improvement in timeline performance or rendering. Also, I lost the ability to render mp4 files with the MainConcept CODEC using the GPU (rendered ok using just the CPU, but that kinda defeats the purpose). I also noticed no improvement with Adobe AfterEffects CS6. Uninstalled and returned the card.

Quadro 4000 - installed yesterday; slightly more processing power than the GTX460, but no noticeable performance improvement in Vegas (timeline and rendering) or AfterEffects. I may give this card up and move back to the GTX 460.

Our IT folks set up a system to test with AfterEffects CS6 -- a quad-core Sandy Bridge CPU with 8GB RAM. We first installed a Quadro 3800 card (192 CUDA cores, same as the 550ti) and then the GTX 680.

With the 3800 card this system had at least double the performance in After Effects compared to my work system (6-core Xeon with 12GB RAM and a GTX 680). Installing the GTX 680 did not result in a noticeable performance difference either way. NOTE: I did not install Vegas on this system.

Even after I enabled hyperthreading in my 6-core work system performance did not noticeably improve in either Vegas or AE and it caused an issue where the GTX 680 limited the resolution of my 30" Dell monitor (2560 x 1600 native) to 1920 x 1080.

It would appear that application performance does not scale up in a linear fashion based on the number of CUDA cores. It would also appear that the largest performance gains are experienced with newer CPU architectures. So if the price is significantly lower you may want to consider sticking with the 550ti and put the cost savings toward upgrading your CPU (and Motherboard) to a newer Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge part. When apps can better take advantage of the higher end GPUs then I would consider upgrading the graphics card as well.

FrigidNDEditing wrote on 6/27/2012, 2:09 PM

also remember the 680 (Kepler) has a totally different architecture from the 400 and 500 lines (fermi) which changes the game a lot in terms of how things are optimized or if they can even work at all.

Dave

Streamworks Audio wrote on 6/27/2012, 4:17 PM

Thanks guys!

Is the GTX 550 a Fermi then? And would it be safe to stick with the older models then because they are 'tested'?

And it would appear that the GTX 550 would give me a boast in the playback dept?

Guy S. wrote on 6/28/2012, 12:41 PM

The 460 at work and the 550ti at home have always been stable for me.

At home, upgrading from a GeForce 9500 (36 CUDA cores) to a 550ti yielded a large (and very welcome!) boost in timeline performance with Vegas Pro 11.

Before I installed the 550ti I tried an ATI card and that was a complete disaster; Vegas locked up every 60 - 90 seconds and performance was terrible. It was out of my computer within hours.