NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 570: Filling In The Gaps
by Ryan Smith on December 7, 2010 9:00 AM ESTCivilization V
The other new game in our benchmark suite is Civilization 5, the latest incarnation in Firaxis Games’ series of turn-based strategy games. Civ 5 gives us an interesting look at things that not even RTSes can match, with a much weaker focus on shading in the game world, and a much greater focus on creating the geometry needed to bring such a world to life. In doing so it uses a slew of DirectX 11 technologies, including tessellation for said geometry and compute shaders for on-the-fly texture decompression.
Civ 5 is a very interesting game for us. It’s one of the few games we’ve ever tested where performance increases with resolution, something we’re content to attribute to its unique use of DX11 features and what may be a better match between tessellated triangles and 16 pixel quads at higher resolutions. The result is that while it’s CPU limited most of the time, there’s very little reason to not crank up the resolution to your monitor’s native resolution.
Because we’re CPU limited several things are going on. Until we hit 2560 the 470, 480, 570, and 580 are all effectively tied with each other, with the 470 finally falling behind in the end. As a result at 2560 it appears that a GTX 570 is all that’s necessary to take full advantage of the game. Meanwhile NVIDIA has always done better than AMD here in single-GPU scenarios, so the Radeon 5870 is nearly 20% behind the GTX 570. On the flip side the 6850CF shoots well ahead of the GTX 570, hitting what appears to be the cap for AMD cards at around 51fps.
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Taft12 - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
Game, set and match. It will take a long time for Anandtech to redevelop its reputation.7Enigma - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
Seriously? We're still going to preach on this topic? I was one of those in disagreement with the way they handled the launch of the AMD 68XX series cards, but let it die already. This is a LAUNCH article and it deals with the design of the card and the performance of the reference card. As such it should not contain comparisons to OC'd cards.....not AMD nor NVIDIA. In a follow-up article, however, it should be compared to non-reference designs from both camps.If, when the AMD 69XX series cards come out and they include OC'd Nvidia cards, THEN you can rant and rave. But I can guarantee you there is no way they would do that after the fallout of the previous launch.
So I politely ask that you stop.
Kef71 - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
Yes, seriously. Was there ever any official statement if OC cards would be used in GPU launches? I didn't see any but on the other hand anandtech has not been in my bookmark list for a while...strikeback03 - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
Yes, there was, they said because of d-bag comments like yours they would ignore a sector of the market and only provide some of the possible competitors for new products.Kef71 - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
If you really need to be rude, at least spell out "douchebag".slacr - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
I was just wondering why there are no starcraft2 performance figures in the review.Understandably there is no "benchmark" feature implemented in the game and they are annoying and time consuming to run and of course the card can handle it. But it is the only game some of us play and the figures may help guide us to see if it's "worth it".
nitrousoxide - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
It's a more CPU-bound game so it cannot perfectly reflect the difference in GPU performanceRyan Smith - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
I'm still in the process of fully fleshing out our SC2 benchmark. Once the latest rendition of Bench is ready, you'll find SC2 in there.tbtbtb - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
The GTX 570 is now available for pre-order on Amazon for 400$ (http://amzn.to/e89Oo2)Oxford Guy - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
Where is it, especially minimum frame rate testing?While it's nice to see minimum frame rates for Crysis, it would be nice to see them for Metro as well.