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GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs 8600 GTS Crysis Image Quality Comparison Linus Tech Tips

2011-03-15
so my video today is one that you guys seem to quite enjoy from the GTX 560 TI launched so I've got a gtx 550 ti and I am running crisis in DirectX 10 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 a geforce 8600 GT s or 8600 GT so I'm going to go to my image quality compare save game and I'm going to load this up and show you guys what I was able to achieve with thee 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 by 1050 I was able to get things going in 1920 by 1080 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 AAA before I would recommend lower resolution with a AAA AAA 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 had almost everything on high 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 the objects quality is on very high so that is the settings that I'm running at so I'm going to compare that against the 8600 GT s so here's my initial image quality comparison loading game so you can see all the shadows are very soft 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 really hard and ugly as well as I can see you've got some smoke effects going on there basically the game is running at almost max setting 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 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 frogs 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 a 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 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 30fps or higher that's usually what I'm trying to achieve so here I'm just gonna go up this little hill and 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 Linus 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 yes frag grenades okay so let's go let's wait for that truck to show up we're still running it we're only 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 gonna kill this guy and then fully that stupid jeeps gonna come there it is okay so now we're gonna try and blow up that Jeep boom okay so yeah you can see it actually didn't go 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 GT s in place of the gtx 550 ti so before i show you guys what we're able to achieve with the 8600 GT s why don't I show you how it runs at the same image quality settings so looking around you can see that 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 6 FPS which is a completely unplayable experience you have a very difficult time controlling your character everything feels very laggy you can see it's basically like I could I could draw up 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 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 Crysis so let's let's show what we can achieve with the 8600 GT s in terms of image quality to make a more fair comparison alright so with my 8600 GT s 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 grey blob mass the textures are absolutely terrible very very low resolution ah pretty much the settings that I had to run on okay I'll show you the settings really quick our options system settings graphics I was able to stay at full HD resolution that is 1920 by 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 framerate performance to what I was achieving with the gtx 550 so you can see like this barrel has absolutely no definition to it whatsoever it's just don't see once i zoom in it's ok but look at the start 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 looks pretty good so far so let's throw on our speed here so we see 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 grey like big pile of mud mass rocks are just kind of randomly appearing as I get closer here watch this rock BAM rock so yeah I'm trying to get as as high quality and image as I can while not getting below you can see we dip down to about 27 FPS there but while not getting too much below 30 frames per second all and I died okay I'll be back in moment okay there and back to the same spot again so yeah like I was saying as high in image quality settings as possible or as high image quality settings as possible without dipping below 30fps or at least not too far below 30fps so I'm going to wait for that truck to show up and we'll do the the explosion that acts as the finale of my little run-through here but I mean the same thing just draw distance is a big one 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 and Britt 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 GT s super super clocked on my test bench thank you for checking out this little comparison between the gtx 550 ti and its several year old counterpart so if you were thinking about upgrading from an older DirectX 10 level GPU to a newer DirectX 11 one hopefully this video gives you some idea of the image quality that you're missing don't forget to 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