now this video is going to be a bit of a look at sli scaling on the gtx 550 ti
now sli has been a big story for NVIDIA since they first released it with the
6800 series however not every
not every card necessarily makes sense to run an sli so
i've always been of the mind that if there is
a better card than the one that you have
that is as good as two of the one that you have
running in sli you're probably usually better off to go with the single more
powerful card versus the two slower
weaker cards running in sli so i wanted
to take a quick snapshot of some directx 11 titles so the ones that i've gone
with are hawks 2 lost planet 2 and metro 2033 and
i compared 4 different scenarios so i compared a single gtx 550 ti cyclone 2
so that is a slightly overclocked card i compared that running an sli with a
gtx 550 ti reference card
i compared a gtx 560 twin frozen two so
once again this is a slightly overclocked card but since neither of
these carry a price premium over the reference cards i see no reason to
necessarily bench with reference cards and the last one that i included was the
gtx 570. so the reason i've gone this
route is that the cost of a single 550 ti
is well significantly lower than anything
else on the table however the cost of two of them together
actually lands somewhere in between a 560
and a 570 so that's why i wanted to test
the single gpus that are available on either side of the price bracket of
this dual GPU solution now the upgrading guys will say well yeah but what if i
wanted to upgrade to one later then my response would be well then what you
really should have done was saved a couple extra bucks to buy something else
uh in the first place if you need more performance then buy something with more
performance so here we go why don't we have a look at the benchmarks that i was able to run
here and we'll start with hawks too so in hawks 2 you can see that the gtx 550
ti at about 85 frames per second actually scales incredibly well in this
particular game so that's like uh 90 percent scaling or so and
actually performs right exactly where it's supposed to be in between the 560
ti and the 570. however even this is an
ideal scenario an ideal scenario has the 550 ti performing about where it should
in terms of the pricing of this solution
so you're going to see that the problem with sli is that it doesn't always scale
in an ideal fashion so right here our 550 performs about where it should with
respect to a 560 and even a 570 but the
sli solution while costing more than a 560
and consuming more power than a single 560 actually doesn't even perform as
well and remember the 550 ti sli
solution is about as expensive as in between these two so really it should be
right in between them it should be around 50 FPS but it's uh it's about 10
to 12 percent slower than that in lost planet 2. and now let's have a look at
the last one that i ran here which is a metro 2033 benchmark so here i've got it
running at normal quality with tessellation on and zero times
anti-aliasing all of these benchmarks are at 1920x1200 by the way so you can
see the 550 ti is right here 550 ti sli
really doesn't scale that well compared to where it should be which is around 90
FPS so once again we're looking at like a 20 performance delta
difference between where it should be to justify the price versus where it
is when it doesn't scale quite as well as
it could so i basically the conclusion
of this is that the 550 ti if you do buy
one and you find yourself needing some more performance yes you can get
additional performance and you can go from what i would consider basic
playable to very very playable in a demanding game like metro 2033 at full
hd resolution however if you know you need the performance
you're going to be playing demanding games at hd resolution then just get a
560 ti do yourself a favor and buy the right card in the first place because
even though once in a while and this is sort of the
exception not the rule the 550 ti sli
setup will outperform a 560 ti you're gonna get a more consistent overall
experience with a single more powerful card versus two
more entry level cards running in tandem
so thanks for checking out this video online as tech tips don't forget to
subscribe and for more right for more unboxings
reviews and other computer videos