GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs 8600 GTS Crysis Image Quality Comparison Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,941 words · ~9 min read
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so my video today is one that you guys seem to quite enjoy from the GTX 560 TI
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launch so I've got a GTX 550 TI and I am
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running crisis in directx10 mode and
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what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be comparing the playable settings
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and the image quality that I can get on a GTX 550 TI versus what that kind of a
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price would have bought you a few years ago which is an uh GeForce 8600 GTS or
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8600 GT so I'm going to go to my image
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quality compare save game and uh I'm going to
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load this up and show you guys what I was able to achieve with the oh no you
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know what ah yes no first I'll show you the settings that I have everything at
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let's do that okay so system settings I
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was able to with the 550 TI and this is really impressive especially considering
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that this card is designed for 1680 x150
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I was able to get things going at 1920x 108 so that is full HD resolution
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anti-aliasing is not an option with a card of this level at that kind of
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resolution in crisis but that is to be expected and before anyone asks yes I
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recommend higher resolution with no AA before I would recommend lower
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resolution with aa aa is basically just
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fake resolution and you're better off to have real resolution I was also able to
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run the game mostly on high settings so I have almost everything on high uh
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remember this is a 1 gig card so textures are not going to be a real big
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issue for it which is really nice to see on a card of again this price point I
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did turn motion blur off and I think I
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also adjusted one other thing oh yeah objects quality is on very high so uh
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that is the settings that I'm running at so I'm going to compare that against the
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8600 GTS so here's my initial image
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quality comparison loading game so you can see all the Shadows are very soft uh
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we can see very clearly into the distance on the screen I'm
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actually here I'm going to lift up my camera show you guys what I mean so
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here's an example of the Shadows being detailed and soft versus being uh really
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hard and ugly as well as uh you can see
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we got some smoke effects going on there basically the game is running at almost
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Max settings so this is all pretty high there's some more Shadows for you I'm
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going to put the camera down for a second here and just sort of run through
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the gameplay I want you guys to make note of
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the uh fraps counter up in the top right
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corner I hope you can see that you know what I'm going to adjust you up just a
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little bit so I can be sure that you can see that fraps counter so right now
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we're at 40 or so FPS so I'm just going to run forward you can see the water
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looks great I'm going to blow up a barrel so it drops down to 31 FPS
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minimum when I blow up that Barrel 31 FPS minimum when I do the second one all
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the foliage is nice and detailed draw distances are great so I can see all the
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way up to that mountain with no difficulty whatsoever just going to go
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into uh speed mode here hop over to the
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truck and I'm just going to do a little gameplay sequence with you guys so that
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you can also get a feel
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for uh what the lowest frame rate will
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be during our gameplay sequence so my
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objective when I'm running a game is not to run at 30fps but to have my lowest
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dips to be 30 FPS or higher that's
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usually what I'm trying to achieve so here I'm just going to go up this little
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Hill in my Jeep here you can see we're still running at about 35 FPS and now
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we're headed into a combat scenario here where hopefully I won't die I'm running
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on easy just so that there's not much risk of that because the point of this
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demo isn't how good is lonus at video games the point is how good is the video
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card we're talking about at video games so the frag grenades where did they go
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ah yeah FR grenades okay so let's go let's wait for that uh truck to show up
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we're still running we're running at about 40 FPS with no characters on the
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screen and at about 30 FPS with lots of characters running around all over the
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screen so we're at 33 right now we're in the foliage we're going to kill this guy
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and then hopefully that stupid Jeep's going to come there it is okay so now
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we're going to try and blow up that jeep
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boom okay so yeah you can see it actually didn't drop oh no I didn't get
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it shoot
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there we go so 26 at the absolute lowest
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when we're blowing up a Jeep and it's right in front of us and still very
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playable at that kind of a frame rate so now let's go back and run the 8600 GTS
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in place of the GTX 550
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TI so before I show you guys uh what
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we're able to achieve with the 8600 GTS why don't I show you how it runs at the
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same same image quality settings so
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looking around you can see that uh you
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know obviously we've got the same high quality Shadows we've got the same Long
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View distance we've got the same particle effects all of that good stuff
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but if you check the FPS counter up in the
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corner I can barely even hit that you can see it's running around 11 frames
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per second and drops down as low as 7 frames per second which look I'm having
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trouble even hitting a barrel like this 6f PS which is a completely unplayable
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experience you have a very difficult time controlling your character
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Everything feels very laggy uh you can see it's basically like I I could I
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could draw by hand the game and then
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make a flipbook out of it and it would probably be faster than trying to play
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it like this so it it definitely delivers a better gameplay experience to
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run a higher end card if you're going to try and run at full HD resolution with
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high details in a game like Crisis
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so let's uh let's show what we can achieve with the 8600 GTS in terms of
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image quality to make a more fair comparison all right so with my 8600 GTS
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let's do a quick image quality comparison here which honestly there's
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going to be no comparison I mean check out the quality of the water it
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basically looks like a big gray blob
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Mass uh the textures are absolutely terrible very very low resolution uh
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pretty much the settings that I had to run on here I'll show you the settings
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really quick are options system settings
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Graphics I was able to stay at full HD resolution that is 1920 x 1080 but I
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have to run pretty much well no not pretty much I have to run everything on
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low and I had to turn motion blur off to get similar frame rate performance to
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what I was achieving with the GTX 550 so
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you can see like this Barrel has absolutely no definition to it whatever
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it's just there see once I zoom in it's okay but look at the star contrast I
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mean look the bottom of this piece it's not even the same color at all and
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that's what how much of a difference you get in terms of the distance you are
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from objects and what quality they are at this low of a detail setting so you
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can look at the car the car actually gets like bits added to it as you get
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closer so that it doesn't have to render as much from further away okay so here's
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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
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to the FPS counter up there on the top so this is usually one of my first quick
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tests you know so I blow up some barrels see how that goes see what kind of
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performance we get everything's looks pretty good so far so let's throw on our
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speed here so we've the lowest dip we've seen so far is 34 FPS remember my
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objective when tuning in these settings was to achieve the highest graphical
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settings and in this case I've gone with resolution
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versus more details because that makes it more of an Apples to Apples
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comparison in terms of the GPU processing power of these two cards I
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mean look at this though look at the grass appearing as I'm driving along the
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draw distances are so so close the beach
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just looks like a big white Mass the water just looks like a big gray like
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big pile of mud Mass um rocks are just
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kind of randomly appearing as I get closer here watch this rock bam Rock um
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so yeah I'm trying to get as as
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high quality and image as I
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can while not getting below well you can
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see we dip down to about 27 FPS there but while not getting too much below 30
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frames per second oh and I died okay I'll be back in a moment okay there I'm
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back to the same spot again so yeah like I was saying um as high in image quality
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settings as possible or as high image quality settings as possible without
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dipping below 30 FPS or at least not too
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far below 30 FPS so I'm going to wait for that uh truck to show up and we'll
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do the uh the explosion that acts as the
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finale of my little run through here but I mean same thing just draw distance is
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a big one um texture quality is another
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big one I mean that Barrel before really drove the point home I think here comes
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a grenade so boom explosion dips us down
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to about 30 FPS and I'm dead but that was pretty much all I wanted to say so
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there's the 8600 GTS super super clocked
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on my test bench thank you for checking out this little comparison between the
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GTX 550 TI and it's several year old
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counterpart so if you were thinking about upgrading from an older directx10
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level GPU to a newer direct x111 hopefully this video gives you some idea
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of the image quality that you're missing don't forget to subscribe to lus Tech
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