NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 560 Ti: Upsetting The $250 Market
by Ryan Smith on January 25, 2011 9:00 AM ESTFinal Thoughts
Wrapping things up, for the last week now I’ve been spending a considerable amount of time going over two thoughts: 1) What do I make of the GTX 560 Ti, and 2) What do I make of the name? The latter may sound silly, but I’m almost positive it’s the more important question. After all, why would NVIDIA resurrect the Ti suffix after an 8 year absence?
The answer I believe is a matter of momentum. There was a reason we called the GTX 460 the $200 King at its introduction: it was an aggressively priced card that shifted the market overnight, delivering a very high quality midrange card to a market that AMD failed to hit during their reign as the king. With a number of very quick price drops following its launch, it quickly became the $200 card of choice until AMD could fire back with the Radeon HD 6800 series. I would not classify it as the kind of legendary card that NVIDIA’s Ti 4200 became, but it had a good shot at it.
NVIDIA is now faced with a question of how they should follow-up on the GTX 460 only 6 months later. It would be difficult to recreate the GTX 460’s launch at this time – the market doesn’t have any gaping holes and NVIDIA does not have a brand-new chip. But NVIDIA wants to recreate July of 2010 anyhow – and with any luck April of 2002 while they’re at it. And that is why we have Ti.
To get a 30% performance improvement out of what’s fundamentally the same GPU is quite an accomplishment. I do not believe NVIDIA was originally intending for it to be this way (rather they’d launch something like the 560 back in July of 2010), but the result is nevertheless remarkable. Since the launch of the GTX 460 NVIDIA’s launches have been mostly solid, and the GTX 560 Ti adds to that list. Price/performance is not quite as aggressive as the GTX 460, but NVIDIA is still being aggressive enough to reshape the market – why else are we seeing Radeon HD 6800s for so cheap, and the very sudden launch of the 1GB Radeon HD 6950?
So what do I make of the GTX 560 Ti? There’s the question I haven’t quite answered. It seems like the video cards that go down in history as being truly great are aggressively priced cards the competition has no immediate answer for. I firmly believe that NVIDIA deserves most of the credit for the recent shakeup in video card pricing between $200 and $300 due to the launch of the GTX 560 Ti. But credit is not the same as a solid recommendation.
AMD’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. With sufficient case cooling both the GTX 560 and the Radeon HD 6950 1GB are good cards for the price, and represent a meaningful step up from where we were just 2 weeks ago. Ultimately I think the situation is very similar to December’s launch of the 6900 series, and the match-up between the GTX 570 and the Radeon HD 6970: we have two very similar cards in almost all respects. The GTX 560 Ti ultimately has the edge: it’s a bit faster and it’s quieter than the 6950, and if that’s all you care about then there’s the answer you seek. But you could grab the 6950 1GB and you’d be doing no worse. 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.
In the long run I suspect pricing pressures will make things clearer. Based on what we’ve seen with the GTX 460, NVIDIA clearly has more pricing latitude than AMD with products in this range and with GPUs between 300mm2 and 400mm2. A stalemate is only 1 price drop away from being a clear victory for NVIDIA, so it may simply come down to just how badly NVIDIA wants to win.
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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.