NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 560 Ti: Upsetting The $250 Market
by Ryan Smith on January 25, 2011 9:00 AM ESTThe Test
Launching virtually alongside the GTX 560 Ti is NVIDIA’s latest driver branch, Forceware Release 265, with the first WHQL driver being 266.58. Released in beta form earlier this month and in its WHQL form last week, 265 contains the usual mix of documented performance increases (particularly with SLI), bug fixes, and ancillary improvements such as supporting 3D Vision in windowed mode. Most important to our testing are the optimizations that NVIDIA made to their drivers for Civilization V, and their OpenCL drivers; scores in both those areas have gone way up. Elsewhere performance is largely consistent for single card setups, while SLI gains are a bit more consistent.
Please note that for the time being we’re focusing on single card performance, as we have not had the time to update all of our SLI configurations to take in to account these new drivers. We’ll be looking at GTX 560 Ti SLI performance a bit later this week once we’ve revised all of our SLI results.
For our 400 and 500 series cards we’re using the newly released 266.58 drivers, while for the GTX 560 Ti we’re using the beta 266.56 drivers – which as near as we can tell are identical save for the fact that 266.58 didn’t build in GTX 560 Ti support. Meanwhile the GTX 200 series and below continues to use 262.99.
On the AMD side of things we’re adding the newly launched Radeon HD 6950 1GB. Most of the time performance is identical to the 2GB version, but as we’ve seen in our 6950 1GB companion launch article, there is a difference at times.
Finally, for NVIDIA cards all tests were done with default driver settings unless otherwise noted. As for AMD cards, we are disabling their new AMD Optimized tessellation setting in favor of using application settings (note that this doesn’t actually have a performance impact at this time), everything else is default unless otherwise noted.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-920 @ 3.33GHz |
| Motherboard: | Asus Rampage II Extreme |
| Chipset Drivers: | Intel 9.1.1.1015 (Intel) |
| Hard Disk: | OCZ Summit (120GB) |
| Memory: | Patriot Viper DDR3-1333 3 x 2GB (7-7-7-20) |
| Video Cards: |
AMD Radeon HD 6970 AMD Radeon HD 6950 2GB AMD Radeon HD 6950 1GB AMD Radeon HD 6870 AMD Radeon HD 6850 AMD Radeon HD 5970 AMD Radeon HD 5870 AMD Radeon HD 5850 AMD Radeon HD 5770 AMD Radeon HD 4870 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 1GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 768MB NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 |
| Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA ForceWare 262.99 NVIDIA ForceWare 266.56 Beta NVIDIA ForceWare 266.58 AMD Catalyst 10.10e AMD Catalyst 11.1a Hotfix |
| OS: | Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit |
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SolMiester - Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - link
Hi can we please have some benchies on this feature please...While surround is not an option for the single nVidia card, 3D is, and it is hard to judge performance with this enabled. Readers need to know if 3D is an viable option with this card at perhaps 16x10 or 19x10Ta
DarknRahl - Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - link
I agree with some of the other comments and find the conclusion rather odd. I didn't really get why all the comparison's were done with the 460 either, yes this is the replacement card for the 460 but isn't really to relevant as far a purchasing decision goes at this moment in time. I found HardOCP's review far more informative, especially as they get down to brass tacs; the price to performance. In both instances the 560 doesn't make too much sense.I still enjoy reading your reviews of other products, particularly power supplies and CPUs.
kallogan - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
Put those damn power connectors at the top of the graphic card, think about mini-itx users !!! Though this one is 9 inches, should fit in my sugo sg05 anyway.neo_moco - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
I really don`t understand the conclusion :The radeon 6950 wins hands down in 1920x and 2560x in almost all important games: crysis , metro , bad company2, mass effect 2 and wolfenstein
The geforce wins only the games who not a lot of people play : civ 5 , battleforge, hawx , dirt 2
Add to that others tests : 6950 wins in the popular call of duty , vantage .
In 3dmark 11 the geforce is 15 % weaker(guru3d) so the conclusion as i see it : radeon 6950 1 gb is aprox. 5-10 % better and not the other way .
neo_moco - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
after 15 months of the radeon 5850 launch we get a card 10 % better for the same price; i dont get the enthusiasm of some people over this cards ; its kind of lameHangFire - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
"By using a center-mounted fan, NVIDIA went with a design that recirculates some air in the case of the computer instead of a blower that fully exhausts all hot air."I don't think I've ever seen a middle or high end NVIDIA card that fully exhausted all hot air. Maybe it exists, I certainly haven't owned them all, perhaps in the customized AIB vendor pantheon there have been a few.
This is not just a nitpick. When swapping out an 8800GT to an 8800 Ultra a few years back, I thought I was taking a step forwards in case temperatures, because the single-slot GT was internally vented and the Ultra had that second slot vent. I didn't notice the little gap, or the little slots in the reference cooler shroud.
That swap began a comical few months of debugging and massive case ventilation upgrades. Not just the Ultra got hot, everything in that case got hot. Adding a second 120mm input fan and another exhaust, an across-the-PCI-slots 92mm fan finally got things under control (no side panel vent). Dropping it into a real gamer case later was even better. (No, I didn't pay $800 for the Ultra, either).
I'm not a fan of, um, graphics card fans that blow in two directions at once, I call them hard drive cookers, and they can introduce some real challenges in managing case flow. But I no longer run under the assumption that a rear-venting double slot cooler is necessarily better.
I'd like to see some case-cooker and noise testing with the new GTX 560 Ti reference, some AIB variants, and similar wattage rear venting cards. In particular, I'd like to see what temps a hard drive forward of the card endures, above, along, and below.
WRH - Saturday, January 29, 2011 - link
I know that comparing an on CPU chip graphics with GPU cards like the ones on this list would be like comparing a Prius to a Ferrari but I would like to see the test results just the same. Sandy Bridge on CPU GPUs come in two models (2000 and 3000). It would be interesting to see just how far below the Radeon HD4870 they are and see how the 2000 and 3000 compare.