NVIDIA’s second-generation Fermi graphics has now entered into the budget class with the launch of the GeForce GTX 550 Ti. The card costs just $150 and drops below the $250 of the GTX 560 Ti by cutting back on its parallelism. The 550 Ti 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 show performing around or above the level of AMD’s Radeon HD 5770.
Cards should be available immediately with 1GB of video memory from third parties such as MSI, PNY and Zotac, though pricing will vary depending on whether or not the hardware uses NVIDIA’s reference speeds or is overclocked.
