NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 560 Ti: Upsetting The $250 Market
by Ryan Smith on January 25, 2011 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.
We have always considered Civ 5 an interesting game both for its near-complete use of the DX11 feature set, and because of its interesting performance characteristics. 2 weeks ago we called it CPU limited based on the fact that once we had sufficiently powerful cards, AMD and NVIDIA results tended to clump together despite any difference in their respective cards’ speed. With the Forceware Release 265 drivers, NVIDIA has blown this assumption apart, with NVIDIA’s more powerful cards launching ahead at 1920 and lower. We appear to be quite GPU limited on the NVIDIA side all of a sudden, which is about as drastic change as we could expect. Furthermore NVIDIA is holding their cards close to their chest on this – they’ve obviously found a wonder optimization, but they aren’t ready to say what it is.
In any case while AMD has always trailed NVIDIA in single card performance in Civ 5, with these driver changes it’s quite monumental. The GTX 560 Ti is 44% faster than the 6950 at 1920, 80% faster at 1680, and even the GTX 460 768MB can edge out the 6970 at 1920. Whatever NVIDIA has done, it has made Civilization V quite a lot faster and smoother at 1920 and 1680, particularly when a large number of units are on screen.
Among NVIDIA’s own cards the lead has actually shrunk some compared to our earlier games. The GTX 470 has an edge on the GTX 560, and the 560 in turn is down to a 25%-30% lead over the GTX 460 1GB. We don’t seem to be ROP or memory bandwidth limited, so perhaps this is a case of the GF104/GF114 architecture’s shaders underperforming?
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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.