NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 560 Ti: Upsetting The $250 Market
by Ryan Smith on January 25, 2011 9:00 AM ESTMetro 2033
The next game on our list is 4A Games’ Metro 2033, their tunnel shooter released last year. In September the game finally received a major patch resolving some outstanding image quality issues with the game, finally making it suitable for use in our benchmark suite. At the same time a dedicated benchmark mode was added to the game, giving us the ability to reliably benchmark much more stressful situations than we could with FRAPS. If Crysis is a tropical GPU killer, then Metro would be its underground counterpart.
Another game, another flip-flop. Here we see the GTX 560 come in under the 6950 1GB by around 10% at 1920, and closing the gap at 1680 where we don’t use as many advanced features. It’s quite a situation to be seeing the performance of the GTX 560 flip between near-6870 performance and near-6970 performance, and at the same time cementing the fact that the best GPU for any given game is highly, highly dependent on the game.
Meanwhile at 1920 though the GTX 560 does gather the distinction of being the bare minimum GeForce card needed to get Metro to or above a 30fps average, showcasing just how stressful the game is.
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auhgnist - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link
1920x1080 graph is wrong, should be mistakenly used that of 2560x1600Ryan Smith - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link
Fixed. Thanks.Marlin1975 - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link
6950 1gig look good.I am guessing the 560 will either drop in price very quickly or the 6950 will sell better.
Lolimaster - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link
Not impressive at alla the 560, 6950 1GB is a good value over the 2GB 6950. I think if you just prefer 1GB 6870 offers more bang for buck.cactusdog - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link
Wow, plenty of good options from AMD and Nvidia. Since the introduction of eyefinity and 3D surround, we dont need to spend a fortune to play the latest games. For most users with 1 monitor a $250 dollar card gives excellent performance.tech6 - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link
Like top end desktop CPUs, the high end GPU really seems to be increasingly irrelevant for most gamers as the mid-range provides plenty of performance for a fraction of the cost.Nimiz99 - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link
I was just curious about the 2.8 FPS on Crysis by the Radeon HD 5970 - is that reproducible/consistent?I am just curious, b/c on the first graph of average frame-rate it leads the pack; if it fluctuates that badly I would definitely like a little bit more background on it.
'Preciate the response,
Nimiz
Ryan Smith - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link
No, it's highly variable. With only 1GB of effective VRAM, the Radeon cards are forced to texture swap - the minimum framerate is chaotic at best and generally marks how long the worst texture swap took. With swapping under the control of AMD's drivers, the resulting minimum framerate ends up being quite variable.Shadowmaster625 - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link
Can somebody explain why 1GB is not enough when 1GB is enough memory to store over 160 frames at 24 bits at 1920x1080. At 60fps, 1GB should be able to supply a constant uncompressed stream of frames for almost 3 whole seconds. Seems like more than enough memory to me. Sounds like somebody is just haphazardly wasting vast amounts of space for no reason at all. Sort of like windows with its WinSXS folder. Lets just waste a bunch of space because we can!ciukacz - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link
are you streaming your benchmark video through youtube ?because i am rendering mine realtime, which requires loading all the textures, geometry etc.