NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti brings next-gen Fermi to $150
updated 11:00 am EDT, Tue March 15, 2011
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti official
NVIDIA pushed its second-generation Fermi graphics architecture further into the budget realm on Tuesday through the GeForce GTX 550 Ti. Its card costs just $150 and drops below the $250 of the GTX 560 Ti by cutting back on its parallelism It uses 192 processing cores versus the higher-end chipset's 384, a reduced 192-bit memory bus (versus 256-bit) and has half the texture addressing units at 32, although it partly compensates with a higher 900MHz main clock and faster 1.8GHz GDDR5 memory.
It still supports the full DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4 feature set along with extras like 3D Vision.
Early tests at AnandTech have it roughly on par with or faster than AMD's Radeon HD 5770 but trailing behind the only slightly more expensive 6850 as well as the previous generation, but cheaper and significantly faster, GeForce GTX 460.
Cards should be available immediately with 1GB of video memory from third parties such as MSI and Zotac, though pricing will vary depending on whether or not the hardware uses NVIDIA's reference speeds or is overclocked. Computer builders are also likely to use the GTX 550 Ti in pre-assembled systems.
