NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 560 Ti: Upsetting The $250 Market
by Ryan Smith on January 25, 2011 9:00 AM ESTBattlefield: Bad Company 2
The latest game in the Battlefield series - Bad Company 2 – remains as one of the cornerstone DX11 games in our benchmark suite. As BC2 doesn’t have a built-in benchmark or recording mode, here we take a FRAPS run of the jeep chase in the first act, which as an on-rails portion of the game provides very consistent results and a spectacle of explosions, trees, and more.
Even more so than HAWX, Bad Company 2 marks the closest we’ve seen the GTX 560 and the 6950 1GB. At 1920 the 6950 has a lead of under a frame per second, and it’s not until 1680 that we see the GTX 560 take any kind of lead. In this case both cards just pass the all-important 60fps mark at 1920, representing the bottom necessary for (more or less) fully fluid gameplay.
While we’re not generally interested in 2560 with the GTX 560, it is the only resolution that we run our Waterfall benchmark on, so we’ll quickly comment. NVIDIA normally does quite well here and the GTX 560 is no exception – even though it loses at this resolution on average, it’s 30% faster when it comes to minimums. We’ve seen the minimums in Crysis go the other way, so minimums seem just as game-dependent as the averages with all things considered.
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SolMiester - Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - link
Hi can we please have some benchies on this feature please...While surround is not an option for the single nVidia card, 3D is, and it is hard to judge performance with this enabled. Readers need to know if 3D is an viable option with this card at perhaps 16x10 or 19x10Ta
DarknRahl - Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - link
I agree with some of the other comments and find the conclusion rather odd. I didn't really get why all the comparison's were done with the 460 either, yes this is the replacement card for the 460 but isn't really to relevant as far a purchasing decision goes at this moment in time. I found HardOCP's review far more informative, especially as they get down to brass tacs; the price to performance. In both instances the 560 doesn't make too much sense.I still enjoy reading your reviews of other products, particularly power supplies and CPUs.
kallogan - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
Put those damn power connectors at the top of the graphic card, think about mini-itx users !!! Though this one is 9 inches, should fit in my sugo sg05 anyway.neo_moco - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
I really don`t understand the conclusion :The radeon 6950 wins hands down in 1920x and 2560x in almost all important games: crysis , metro , bad company2, mass effect 2 and wolfenstein
The geforce wins only the games who not a lot of people play : civ 5 , battleforge, hawx , dirt 2
Add to that others tests : 6950 wins in the popular call of duty , vantage .
In 3dmark 11 the geforce is 15 % weaker(guru3d) so the conclusion as i see it : radeon 6950 1 gb is aprox. 5-10 % better and not the other way .
neo_moco - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
after 15 months of the radeon 5850 launch we get a card 10 % better for the same price; i dont get the enthusiasm of some people over this cards ; its kind of lameHangFire - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
"By using a center-mounted fan, NVIDIA went with a design that recirculates some air in the case of the computer instead of a blower that fully exhausts all hot air."I don't think I've ever seen a middle or high end NVIDIA card that fully exhausted all hot air. Maybe it exists, I certainly haven't owned them all, perhaps in the customized AIB vendor pantheon there have been a few.
This is not just a nitpick. When swapping out an 8800GT to an 8800 Ultra a few years back, I thought I was taking a step forwards in case temperatures, because the single-slot GT was internally vented and the Ultra had that second slot vent. I didn't notice the little gap, or the little slots in the reference cooler shroud.
That swap began a comical few months of debugging and massive case ventilation upgrades. Not just the Ultra got hot, everything in that case got hot. Adding a second 120mm input fan and another exhaust, an across-the-PCI-slots 92mm fan finally got things under control (no side panel vent). Dropping it into a real gamer case later was even better. (No, I didn't pay $800 for the Ultra, either).
I'm not a fan of, um, graphics card fans that blow in two directions at once, I call them hard drive cookers, and they can introduce some real challenges in managing case flow. But I no longer run under the assumption that a rear-venting double slot cooler is necessarily better.
I'd like to see some case-cooker and noise testing with the new GTX 560 Ti reference, some AIB variants, and similar wattage rear venting cards. In particular, I'd like to see what temps a hard drive forward of the card endures, above, along, and below.
WRH - Saturday, January 29, 2011 - link
I know that comparing an on CPU chip graphics with GPU cards like the ones on this list would be like comparing a Prius to a Ferrari but I would like to see the test results just the same. Sandy Bridge on CPU GPUs come in two models (2000 and 3000). It would be interesting to see just how far below the Radeon HD4870 they are and see how the 2000 and 3000 compare.