ATI 9550 vs Nvidia 6200

I see a lot of question in internet seeking answer which one is better. My machine was running on Nvidia 6200 graphics card for long. But recently the hardware failed and I had to buy a new AGP card, and an ATI 9550 was my only available option. So I had a chance to see which product is better in real time.

Let’s see the specification of each product first :

ATI 9550

• Brand/Model: MSI rx9550 TD/256 
• Memory: DDR 256MB (128bit) 
• RAMDAC: 250mhz 
• Clock Speed: 200mhz 
• DirectX 9.01 
• OpenGL 1.5 
• Pixel Shader 2.0

 nVidia 6200

• Brand/Model: Asus n6200 TD/128 
• Memory: DDR 128MB (128bit)
• RAMDAC: 400mhz 
• Clock Speed: 250mhz 
• DirectX 9.01 
• OpenGL 1.5 
• Pixel Shader 3.0 

Although the memory is doubled than my previous 6200, but I was not expecting that much performance boost from the ATI 9550 because the clock and memory speed is very lower compared to Nvidia’s.

I ran benchmarking in Windows 7 rating system and here is what I got for each card:

ATI 9550
Desktop Performance - 3.6
Gaming Performance - 3.4

 Nvidia 6200
Desktop Performance - 2.9
Gaming Performance - 3.2

As you can see, the performance increase for desktop performance jumped. And Windows 7 runs like never before.

The major performance measurement was game performance. I typically play games on my Windows Xp OS because I don’t have a decent gaming machine to run games on Windows 7. But after installing the new card, I can play in windows 7 and the games ran very good.

I tested GTA San Andreas and Star Craft 2 and Windows 7 runs it better and smoother than Windows XP.

The big surprise was in GTA San Andreas – the graphics got jaw-droopingly improved. Everything got so real and the game physics totally changed. Other high profile games that previously lagged in my computer are also running unexpectedly smooth now.

The biggest disadvantage of ATI 9550 is its compatibility. It doesn’t support Pixel Shader 3.0 and hence many games didn’t even run. Burnout - Paradise City and Call of Duty – modern warfare are two of them I tested. Also ATI 9550 has no supported driver for Windows 7. It uses the default driver provided by Microsoft Corporation. It has though driver compatible for Windows Vista that you can use with Windows 7 too. But I found the driver by Microsoft is better than that. After installing the ATI catalyst driver in both XP and 7, the startup time gets slow for 5 seconds. It takes very long time to load the software.

In conclusion, I must say that ATI hardware is better than similar Nvidia but ATI lags in compatibility and support department. If you are buying any latest ATI card, make sure it has all the standard technology supported. Definitely I am buying ATI for my next graphics card need.