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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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...