NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti Review

While Futuremark is a well-established name where PC benchmarking is concerned, Unigine is just beginning to become exposed to people. The company’s main focus isn’t benchmarks, but rather its cross-platform game engine which it licenses out to other developers, and also its own games, such as a gorgeous post-apocalytic oil strategy game. The company’s benchmarks are simply a by-product of its game engine.

The biggest reason that the company’s “Heaven” benchmark grew in popularity rather quickly is that both AMD and NVIDIA promoted it for its heavy use of tessellation, a key DirectX 11 feature. Like 3DMark Vantage, the benchmark here is overkill by design, so results here aren’t going to directly correlate with real gameplay. Rather, they showcase which card models can better handle both DX11 and its GPU-bogging features.

Proving that NVIDIA still reigns supreme in DX11 performance, the GTX 550 Ti surpasses the HD 5770 by a fair margin here. Overall, AMD’s card is good for overall gaming, while NVIDIA’s has a slight edge for those who might want to run DX11 applications. There’s a definite trade-off for each.