[quote name='JBaz']Honestly, I never liked the 550ti. Reason being, it was meant to replace the aging 460's, but when they launched, its MSRP was $150 last year to be priced between the older 450 and 460's. The 460 was still priced around $160 MSRP, but it was easy to find it for $100-125 new from msi and evga when the 550ti was launched. I grabbed an older 460 for $99 new with a stock aftermarket dual fan cooler from NCIX last year; floating it around in a spare bedroom computer/folding gpu.
To add insult to the 550, it was restricted with the 192 bit wide memory bus compared to the 256 on the 460. In theory, the 550 was faster in fill rate, but in actual throughput and in most games, the 460 was 20% faster.
Nvidia new this and thus the reason why they tried to kill the 460 as fast as possible so consumers couldn't get a better card for cheaper. Even now, its hard to justify spend $100 on a card of when that same $100 last year would net me more frames. (although, admittedly, I do own an evga 550ti, but I got it free as a replacement for my aging 8800 gts that died with lifetime warranty)
If anything, I'd look at these (and that's without really digging through all the BF sales crap):
MSI GTX 650 1GB for $70 AR @ newegg. It's the same power as the 550ti, comes with Assassins Creed 3 and Shogun 2.
MSI Radeon HD 7770 1GB for $106 AR @ NCIX. Its about 20-30% more powerful than the 550ti/650 cards for not much more, even comes with Far Cry 3. But it does run a bit hotter, uses more energy and its AMD without physix. Still a very good value card to challenge the $100 arena.
XFX Radeon HD 6870 1GB for $120 AR @ newegg. Its about double the power as the 550ti/650 cards, again free games: Dirt 3, Far Cry 3 and Two Worlds. Its an older card, but in terms of performance/value, its hard to beat right now; been one of the best budget cards for the last year.
Granted, with all of these cards, you do "suffer" with a 1GB of VRAM compared to the 2GB of that from the EVGA 550ti for $100, but in most games, you would rarely use that much memory because by the time you have a game to allocate huge HD textures to fill 2GB, the GPU on the 550 is too weak to use them. It's like saying your store is better because its the size of a warehouse, yet you only have one cash register... You are going to have some bottlenecks.
Also, Physix isn't any huge feature that is a must need. We nvidia users just call it the "clutter and debris" filter since most games that cheaply implement Physix tends to only use it for flying trash, flags (that get in your way), better shattering glass and more smoke effects (that also get in your way). I end up turning it off for competition play since its a detriment when you can't see your enemy through a cloud smoke, yet he can easily see you cause he has less puffs being rendered. Only a handful of games actually use Physix correctly like Dirt 3 and Batman.[/QUOTE]
Wow! Thanks for the info! I really just want PhysX for the added effects in BL2. I know it's a lot of 'junk' flying around, but BL is supposed to be that way. I am really wanting to avoid Radeon just because I've had problems with their updates several times. But I might still go with them if the card is that much more powerful than the other options. Honestly my current Radeon HD 5670 isnt even bad right now, I only get frame drops in BL2 when theres a lot on the screen at once. I'll have the think about it.
