NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 560: The Top To Bottom Factory Overclock
by Ryan Smith on May 17, 2011 9:00 AM ESTMass Effect 2
Electronic Arts’ space-faring RPG is our Unreal Engine 3 game. While it doesn’t have a built in benchmark, it does let us force anti-aliasing through driver control panels, giving us a better idea of UE3’s performance at higher quality settings. Since we can’t use a recording/benchmark in ME2, we use FRAPS to record a short run.
With Mass Effect 2, AMD and NVIDIA are once again closer to parity, with NVIDIA generally coming out ahead this time. The GTX 560 Mid has a small 3% lead over the 6870, however the 6950 more than keeps its distance from even the best overclocked GTX 560.
Interestingly, among NVIDIA’s lineup the GTX 560 Mid doesn’t do nearly as well compared to the GTX 460 1GB as it normally does. In this case it only has a 14% advantage, well below what it usually has. At the same time the GTX 560 Ti is only 3% ahead of the GTX 560 Mid, which is also lower than normal. Given the insensitivity ME2 seems to have to core clocks and functional units, it looks to be memory bandwidth limited, in which case the GTX 560 Series more limited memory bandwidth gains versus the GTX 460 series means they don’t accumulate quite as big of a lead. The pressure on the memory bandwidth appears to be resolution related though, at least to some extent: the gaps do widen back up once we go to 1680.
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TheJian - Wednesday, May 18, 2011 - link
See my other posts. Nvidia finally got multithreaded rendering finished in their drivers (which should affect many games now, it's not GAME specific). Expect AMD to get theirs done soon. This isn't Civ5 or Anandtech favoring NV, it's just the beat AMD to the punch in getting drivers finished. If AMD takes another year to get their drivers done, I'm glad they report this. I hope AMD gets them done soon, or the next set of cards that get benched might show quite a few games with AMD bunched at the bottom of the list.NOTE: this is a DRIVER issue, not game issue. Both sides have been working on getting this in their drivers for a while. It's about time :) The game had this in it all the time (many other too, get ready for speedups if you own NV and running 2.75 drivers (whatever is latest from NV). Unfortunately my 5850 has to wait for AMD. :(
JarredWalton - Tuesday, May 24, 2011 - link
You know what the best part is about Civ5? AMD is the one that gave out copies of the game to reviewers. Yup -- that and F1 2010.L. - Thursday, May 19, 2011 - link
Errr/ metacritic lol ?We're talking benchmarking here, not playing the game.
AMD being poor is their problem, we shouldn't care ;)
Besides, the way people rate on metacritic or any critic source for anything is at most a relative indicator of how people who take the time to vote feel about stuff... doesn't help that much does it ?
Crysis 2 is NOT in the same series as Crysis 1. If you don't know why, read some more about it.
L. - Thursday, May 19, 2011 - link
Two words for you mate, Bench and MarkThe purpose of benchmarking is to get a relative idea of the performance of a component, not to test every little game out there, because of that reviewers attempt to have a most relevant panel of games/ benchmarks to test the gfx cards.
Crysis 2 is not (yet) a relevant benchmark. Maybe when they're done writing the engine for PC's it will be, but now it's just a worthless console port.
IF you think they're lazy, just post a list of the games you would use to benchmark and ask people how useful they find those.
Spoelie - Wednesday, May 18, 2011 - link
Metro 2033 is a game that requires the force scaling flag I believe. It ignores the scaling settings in AMD's drivers on windows 7 at least..Coloring is wrong on the Civ5 graph (last one)
GeorgeH - Wednesday, May 18, 2011 - link
Taken out of the noise of the other comment stream:"RE: Time to change the tests by Ryan Smith on Tuesday, May 17, 2011
The test suite is due for a refresh, and will either be updated at the end of this month or next month once we build our new SNB testbed."
Weren't you waiting for SNB-E? Isn't that a Q4 release? Or by "SNB" do you mean "Bulldozer" and know something that we don't?
You've got me all curious and maybe excited and more curious and now I-don't-know-what-to-think.