Mass Effect 2

Electronic Arts’ space-faring RPG is our Unreal Engine 3 game. While it doesn’t have a built in benchmark, it does let us force anti-aliasing through driver control panels, giving us a better idea of UE3’s performance at higher quality settings. Since we can’t use a recording/benchmark in ME2, we use FRAPS to record a short run.

Finally we once again have a close race to look at with Mass Effect 2. The 6950 1GB does enjoy a 7% lead at 1920, while this lead largely evaporates at 1680. The 5870 comparison once again seems appropriate though, as at the same resolution the GTX 560 is practically tied. Meanwhile at the same resolution we’re looking at one of the smaller leads the GTX 560 enjoys over the GTX 460 1GB, bagging only a 23% lead – roughly in line with the clockspeed increase. This makes it likely that we’re ROP limited, at least at this resolution.

DIRT 2 Wolfenstein
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  • heflys - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link

    Well, at least they have the distinction of being the only site (that I've seen thus far) to say the 560 is faster than the 6950. It's just laughable, IMHO, that they'd feature several titles known to favor Nvidia (with results showing the 560 beating top-tier AMD cards), yet still reach the conclusion that the 560 is "faster" at stock.

    I've been slowly taking AT less and less seriously.........Thank goodness for their benching charts.
  • ritalinkid18 - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link

    One thing I've noticed about the comments so far... every single person disagreeing with the conclusion ends up agreeing conclusion in their reasoning.

    i.e. "what games you play"

    "The deciding factor seems to come down to just how much to value noise and cooling (560) versus power consumption (6950), what games you play, and whether you’re currently invested in the NVIDIA (CUDA, 3D Vision) or AMD (Eyefinity) ecosystem."
  • heflys - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link

    Well, in that case, Anand is contradicting themselves.....Since (using that logic) the 560 wouldn't be "a bit faster" in performance, or have the overall edge. In other words, they wouldn't be able to conclude which card is "faster." They're conclusion of "faster" is based on their own benchmarks.
  • Ryan Smith - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link

    To be clear, on my master charts the GTX 560 Ti has an average of a 2% performance lead over the 6950 1GB at 1920, and a 10% performance lead at 1680. This doesn't preclude the fact that performance varies wildly by game; it only means that on average the GTX 560 Ti was faster.
  • heflys - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link

    Not surprising looking at the results in HAWX, Civ 5 and Dirt 2.
  • Touche - Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - link

    That's just a terrible way to reach a performance conclusion, in so many ways. Then again, the number of people taking Anandtech's (GPU) reviews seriously is smaller every day. I miss the years it was practically my homepage and main reference point.
  • dananski - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link

    I was puzzled by your comment (and others'). It seemed to me that while the 560 and 6950 1GB were changing relative position in the charts, the 560 really wins hard when it does win, so it would come out slightly above the 6950 on average.

    Plus, I'd prefer a card that does well every time (the 560) but gets slightly beaten occasionally, rather than a card that does well most of the time but really falls behind in certain games.
  • heflys - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link

    People are always jaded when it comes to games that show a significant bias for a particular manufacturer. In the case of Civ 5, HAWX and Dirt 2 (as of late); these titles favor Nvidia products. If you look at the benches, the 560 is even beating a 6970 in some instances.
  • qwsa - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link

    Anandtech has always had their nose up Nvidia and intels ass so no surprise there, but what a lousy conclusion to an awfull review. Apparently Anandtechs efforts to find good writers were in vane.
  • silverblue - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link

    Please... let's not start this again...

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