so my video today is one that you guys seem to quite enjoy from the GTX 560 TI
launch so I've got a GTX 550 TI and I am
running crisis in directx10 mode and
what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be comparing the playable settings
and the image quality that I can get on a GTX 550 TI versus what that kind of a
price would have bought you a few years ago which is an uh GeForce 8600 GTS or
8600 GT so I'm going to go to my image
quality compare save game and uh I'm going to
load this up and show you guys what I was able to achieve with the oh no you
know what ah yes no first I'll show you the settings that I have everything at
let's do that okay so system settings I
was able to with the 550 TI and this is really impressive especially considering
that this card is designed for 1680 x150
I was able to get things going at 1920x 108 so that is full HD resolution
anti-aliasing is not an option with a card of this level at that kind of
resolution in crisis but that is to be expected and before anyone asks yes I
recommend higher resolution with no AA before I would recommend lower
resolution with aa aa is basically just
fake resolution and you're better off to have real resolution I was also able to
run the game mostly on high settings so I have almost everything on high uh
remember this is a 1 gig card so textures are not going to be a real big
issue for it which is really nice to see on a card of again this price point I
did turn motion blur off and I think I
also adjusted one other thing oh yeah objects quality is on very high so uh
that is the settings that I'm running at so I'm going to compare that against the
8600 GTS so here's my initial image
quality comparison loading game so you can see all the Shadows are very soft uh
we can see very clearly into the distance on the screen I'm
actually here I'm going to lift up my camera show you guys what I mean so
here's an example of the Shadows being detailed and soft versus being uh really
hard and ugly as well as uh you can see
we got some smoke effects going on there basically the game is running at almost
Max settings so this is all pretty high there's some more Shadows for you I'm
going to put the camera down for a second here and just sort of run through
the gameplay I want you guys to make note of
the uh fraps counter up in the top right
corner I hope you can see that you know what I'm going to adjust you up just a
little bit so I can be sure that you can see that fraps counter so right now
we're at 40 or so FPS so I'm just going to run forward you can see the water
looks great I'm going to blow up a barrel so it drops down to 31 FPS
minimum when I blow up that Barrel 31 FPS minimum when I do the second one all
the foliage is nice and detailed draw distances are great so I can see all the
way up to that mountain with no difficulty whatsoever just going to go
into uh speed mode here hop over to the
truck and I'm just going to do a little gameplay sequence with you guys so that
you can also get a feel
for uh what the lowest frame rate will
be during our gameplay sequence so my
objective when I'm running a game is not to run at 30fps but to have my lowest
dips to be 30 FPS or higher that's
usually what I'm trying to achieve so here I'm just going to go up this little
Hill in my Jeep here you can see we're still running at about 35 FPS and now
we're headed into a combat scenario here where hopefully I won't die I'm running
on easy just so that there's not much risk of that because the point of this
demo isn't how good is lonus at video games the point is how good is the video
card we're talking about at video games so the frag grenades where did they go
ah yeah FR grenades okay so let's go let's wait for that uh truck to show up
we're still running we're running at about 40 FPS with no characters on the
screen and at about 30 FPS with lots of characters running around all over the
screen so we're at 33 right now we're in the foliage we're going to kill this guy
and then hopefully that stupid Jeep's going to come there it is okay so now
we're going to try and blow up that jeep
boom okay so yeah you can see it actually didn't drop oh no I didn't get
it shoot
there we go so 26 at the absolute lowest
when we're blowing up a Jeep and it's right in front of us and still very
playable at that kind of a frame rate so now let's go back and run the 8600 GTS
in place of the GTX 550
TI so before I show you guys uh what
we're able to achieve with the 8600 GTS why don't I show you how it runs at the
same same image quality settings so
looking around you can see that uh you
know obviously we've got the same high quality Shadows we've got the same Long
View distance we've got the same particle effects all of that good stuff
but if you check the FPS counter up in the
corner I can barely even hit that you can see it's running around 11 frames
per second and drops down as low as 7 frames per second which look I'm having
trouble even hitting a barrel like this 6f PS which is a completely unplayable
experience you have a very difficult time controlling your character
Everything feels very laggy uh you can see it's basically like I I could I
could draw by hand the game and then
make a flipbook out of it and it would probably be faster than trying to play
it like this so it it definitely delivers a better gameplay experience to
run a higher end card if you're going to try and run at full HD resolution with
high details in a game like Crisis
so let's uh let's show what we can achieve with the 8600 GTS in terms of
image quality to make a more fair comparison all right so with my 8600 GTS
let's do a quick image quality comparison here which honestly there's
going to be no comparison I mean check out the quality of the water it
basically looks like a big gray blob
Mass uh the textures are absolutely terrible very very low resolution uh
pretty much the settings that I had to run on here I'll show you the settings
really quick are options system settings
Graphics I was able to stay at full HD resolution that is 1920 x 1080 but I
have to run pretty much well no not pretty much I have to run everything on
low and I had to turn motion blur off to get similar frame rate performance to
what I was achieving with the GTX 550 so
you can see like this Barrel has absolutely no definition to it whatever
it's just there see once I zoom in it's okay but look at the star contrast I
mean look the bottom of this piece it's not even the same color at all and
that's what how much of a difference you get in terms of the distance you are
from objects and what quality they are at this low of a detail setting so you
can look at the car the car actually gets like bits added to it as you get
closer so that it doesn't have to render as much from further away okay so here's
what I'm going to do I'm going to go and I'm going to do a similar run through I want you guys to pay special attention
to the FPS counter up there on the top so this is usually one of my first quick
tests you know so I blow up some barrels see how that goes see what kind of
performance we get everything's looks pretty good so far so let's throw on our
speed here so we've the lowest dip we've seen so far is 34 FPS remember my
objective when tuning in these settings was to achieve the highest graphical
settings and in this case I've gone with resolution
versus more details because that makes it more of an Apples to Apples
comparison in terms of the GPU processing power of these two cards I
mean look at this though look at the grass appearing as I'm driving along the
draw distances are so so close the beach
just looks like a big white Mass the water just looks like a big gray like
big pile of mud Mass um rocks are just
kind of randomly appearing as I get closer here watch this rock bam Rock um
so yeah I'm trying to get as as
high quality and image as I
can while not getting below well you can
see we dip down to about 27 FPS there but while not getting too much below 30
frames per second oh and I died okay I'll be back in a moment okay there I'm
back to the same spot again so yeah like I was saying um as high in image quality
settings as possible or as high image quality settings as possible without
dipping below 30 FPS or at least not too
far below 30 FPS so I'm going to wait for that uh truck to show up and we'll
do the uh the explosion that acts as the
finale of my little run through here but I mean same thing just draw distance is
a big one um texture quality is another
big one I mean that Barrel before really drove the point home I think here comes
a grenade so boom explosion dips us down
to about 30 FPS and I'm dead but that was pretty much all I wanted to say so
there's the 8600 GTS super super clocked
on my test bench thank you for checking out this little comparison between the
GTX 550 TI and it's several year old
counterpart so if you were thinking about upgrading from an older directx10
level GPU to a newer direct x111 hopefully this video gives you some idea
of the image quality that you're missing don't forget to subscribe to lus Tech
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