So I jumped to pretty much the next gen of gaming with this new card.
I’ve learned a many things after my purchase. First of course when I installed this baby in my rig replacing my GeForce GTX 260 w/ 896 MB DDR2 of VRAM. One of the things I’ve learned was going to this -site- where I discovered that the variables in such an instrument vary with different capabilities that aren’t just simply laid out in black and white. There is a lot to be determined, but this card particularly was on sale and I thought I was needing it to replace my old card. I Thought wrong ~ My Monitor display is the one thing I have to replace. In any matter, I have a better much more clearer picture to work with. Oh and as well I am able to use Viewport 2.0 now. Previously I couldn’t use no more than 3 lights on scene using Maya’s new enhanced preview feature or pretty much face an error and force quit from the program.
As I went deeper to find information on how Nvidia order the consumer cards, I discovered that the degree of course are by the series numbers that are of the second digit listing – for example: My card is in the mid-range, GTX 550 compare to 560, 570, 580, and 590. The GeForce series cards for me were a bit confusing because I thought the more memory, the better. Well it is, but there are more factors to it than that. For instance, the CUDA cores are a feature that can’t be overlooked. The CUDA cores are the GPU’s baby gears that make it work as it is. There is a certain amount that I noticed when I looked at my old GTX 260. It was a custom card made by ASUS for some serious gaming intention in mind. In this card it boasted 216 CUDA cores, a little more than the standard GTX 260 on newegg.
The unfortunate part is that i didn’t notice the decrease of performance once after I have gotten my new card. Of course though everything is working fine, but when taking advantage of applications that use CUDA cores to have more of a speed increase like Premiere and After Effects, its a little on the slow edge. Currently my new card only does 192 CUDA cores, which for me I see slight loss in performance.
The performance issue that I see was when using Viewport 2.0 in Maya. Even though it should increase the processes when animating, the hardware memory for the GTX 550 that i have is 2gigs, it doesn’t cache what it should. So my relation connecting to the card working like I wanted it to just doesn’t with my mid-range card because of its low CUDA core count. If I had at least the same amount as my last card I would be very happy camper now. The other thing to this though is that even though the CUDA cores previously were 216, having to get such power now with the higher 500 series would only be effective if you get the overclocked versions. I guess I’ll just bite my desire for more power until later. I would imagine two of my card together to get the REAL power going but that’s when I can afford a new motherboard and power supply. lol
Overall this is a sweet deal I got. Nvidia is giving away a game with this as well last month, I don’t know if they are now, but is just very good for a gamer to be able to upgrade to a DX11. For more power hungry folks go for a 580 – which will hit the sweet spot.