 So my video today is one that you guys seem to quite enjoy from the GTX 560 Ti launch. So I've got a GTX 550 Ti and I'm running Crysis 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 GTS 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 the... 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 Crysis, but that is to be expected. And before anyone asks, yes, I recommend higher resolution with no AA, before I would recommend lower resolution with AA. AA 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. Oh yeah, 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 GTS. 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, you can see, we've got some smoke effects going on there. Basically, the game is running at almost max settings, so this is all pretty high. There's 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 fraps 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 speed mode here. Hop over to the truck. 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 30 FPS, but to have my lowest dips to be 30 FPS or higher. That's usually what I'm trying to achieve. So here, I'm just going to go up this little hill in 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 running 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 going to kill this guy. And then hopefully that stupid Jeep is going to come. There it is. Okay, so now we're going to try and blow up that Jeep. Boom. Okay, so yeah, you can see it actually didn't drop. 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 GTS in place of the GTX 550 Ti. So before I show you guys what we're able to achieve with the 8600 GTS, 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 draw by hand the game and then make a flip book 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 show what we can achieve with the 8600 GTS in terms of image quality to make a more fair comparison. Alright, so with my 8600 GTS, 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 gray blob mass. The textures are absolutely terrible. Very, very low resolution. Pretty much the settings that I had to run on. Here, 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 frame rate 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 there. See, once I zoom in, it's okay. But look at the stark contrast. I mean, look, the bottom of this piece, it's not even the same color at all. And that's 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 in 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've seen 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 gray, 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 high quality and image as I can while not getting below. Well, you can see we dip down to about 27 FPS there. But while not getting too much below 30 frames per second. Oh, and I died. Okay, I'll be back in a moment. Okay there, I'm back to the same spot again. So yeah, like I was saying, as high an image quality settings as possible or as high image quality settings as possible without dipping below 30 FPS or at least not too far below 30 FPS. So I'm going to wait for that truck to show up and we'll do the explosion that acts as the finale of my little run through here. But I mean, 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 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 GTS 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 subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more reviews, unboxings and other computer videos.