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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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...