3DMark11
3DMark 11 is the latest version of this hugely popular synthetic benchmark. Making use of DX11 features such as tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading, it provides modern-day results and is available as a free download.
Being completely transparent, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti standard card is a downclocked Gigabyte GTX 550 Ti OC; we had no access to a completely default card from NVIDIA.
Further, what you need to bear in mind is that, while we have we matched frequencies, we have no control over the cards' memory latencies.
But with those provisos out of the way, let's take a look at the numbers.
| GTX 550 Ti (3D score) | GTS 450 stock | GTS 450 same clock |
| Faster/slower (per cent) | +17.6 | +3.2 |
The extra memory bandwidth and ROPs on the 550 Ti open up a near-20 per cent lead over a stock GTS 450, which is trimmed to virtually nothing when the last-gen GPU is run at matching frequencies.
