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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ggathagan - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link
I believe you mean "Apparently Anandtech's efforts to find good writers were in vain."phoible4 - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link
The GTX560 looks interesting. However, prices for 768MB 460s are hitting rock bottom. I just paid $90 for one from TigerDirect (after rebates), and it looks like there are a few under $130 on Newegg. It seems like it would cost about the same to run SLI 460s and 1 560 (assuming your case can handle it), and I can guess that the SLI config would be faster in most games.I actually kind of expected NVidia to release a dual-chip 460 as their next-gen 580, and take a page out of AMD's playbook (wonder how hot/loud that would be).
Belard - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
The GF 460-768mb are slow compared to their 1Gb versions. They run out of memory way too quick. But for $90... that would be a great deal that is worthwhile. Newegg is showing $150 on avg for the 768mb 460s. Which is about $25 less than a newer 6850 card which is easily faster. Its even faster than the 1GB 460 and cost less.mosox - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link
[quoteAMD’s scramble to launch the Radeon HD 6950 1GB has produced a card with similar levels of performance and pricing as the GTX 560 Ti, making it impossible to just blindly recommend the GTX 560 Ti.[/quote]What? The 6950 2GB is faster than the 560 and the The 6950 2GB is FASTER than the 6950 2GB at every resolution except the highest ones like 2560x1600.
This is from Tom's:
mosox - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link
Read that as The 6950 1GB is FASTER than the 6950 2GB, sorry.Visual - Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - link
you read that right - "tighter memory timings"ritalinkid18 - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link
I would just like to say, very nice article... well written and informative. I've been a fan of anandtech for many years and the GPU articles never disappoint.Is it just me or does anyone else find reading about Nvidia's architecture a lot more interesting?
Also, I really hate that the comments are filled with people that say you are bias towards NVIDIA. To all those people, PLEASE go read the some other reviews. A majority of them praise the 560. This article is more critical of the 560 value than most.
jonks - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link
"The GTX 560 is always faster than the GTX 470, but never immensely so; and at higher resolutions the GTX 470 still has an advantage."So the 560 is always faster than the 470 except when it's not. :)
poohbear - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link
wow the gpu market is definitely intense! nvidia and AMD are neck & neck now, very nice time to buy a vid card!7Enigma - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link
Thanks again Ryan and Anandtech for keeping the 4870 in your charts for 1920X1200 res. I've always read the new gpu reviews and been saddened that although the new cards are fast they were still not approaching 2X the performance of my 4870. With the constant name change with the same parts, or slightly faster parts, it's taken until just about now to have a card worth the upgrade.Now my question is will I see the performance improvement in GAMES using my C2D 8500 (OC'd to 3.8GHz), or do I need to rebuild the system with Sandy Bridge to actually see the 2X GPU performance?