NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 560: The Top To Bottom Factory Overclock
by Ryan Smith on May 17, 2011 9:00 AM ESTBattleForge
Up next is BattleForge, Electronic Arts’ free to play online RTS. As far as RTSes go this game can be quite demanding, and this is without the game’s DX11 features.
Compared to the rest of the NVIDIA lineup, the GTX 560 Mid’s results under BattleForge are even better than they were under Crysis. The GTX 560 Mid is still trailing the GTX 560 Ti by 8%, but this is a smaller gap than we saw under Crysis, meanwhile the GTX 560 Mid is now over 20% faster than the GTX 460 1GB. Keep in mind the theoretical improvement from the 460 to the 560 is about 25%, so we’re attaining almost all of that here. BattleForge has long been a candidate for being ROP partially limited, and this appears to be a good set of data to prove that.
With that said, the GTX 560 still struggles to beat AMD’s offerings. The 6870 has about 5% on the GTX 560 Mid, meanwhile our ASUS GTX 560 trails the 6950 by a similar margin, requiring a further overclock to bring down the gap.
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Ryan Smith - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 - link
In this case we only had the single card.buildingblock - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 - link
My local hardware dealer has the new 560 (non-Ti) in stock today. True, only two models so far but the cheapest 560 in stock costs less than the cheapest 6870 in stock, and even less than some of the 6850s. And that's the issue, graphics cards are about price points. Its no good going on about the AMD 6950 to buyers who are only looking at choosing either a 560 or a 6870, because both are around the same price point. And as already said, the 560 today is actually at a better price point at this dealer than any 6870.One reason why the majority of discrete desktop graphics card buyers continue to purchase nVidia is the quality of the drivers. Or the continuing issues with AMD drivers. There is an example here http://forum.team-mediaportal.com/746244-post1.htm... of a guy who's having problems rendering a web page with a 6950. Yes, that's right a web page, now don't going playing games with it will you.... What he is seeing is partly because the page has a Shockwave slideshow. He complains that GPU usage constantly fluctuates between 0-8-18-44%, with a 6950. With a GTX 550 Ti GPU usage figures 0-2-11% - that's right only 11% with a GTX 550 Ti compared to 44% with an AMD 6950.
That's AMD drivers for you.
DanNeely - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 - link
Meh. That's not a real issue, as can be seen by the replies. Following up on it I'd speculate that the only reason the single time sample spikes at high load are spotted at 175mhz but not at 450 is that at the latter the render takes significantly less than the sample time so they get largely smoothed into the average (as can be seen by the smaller load spikes).There is one real issue in their drivers that's been annoying me significantly since I got my 5870 last summer. When running 2 monitors and a GPU app, when the app completes a work unit it drops down to single monitor speed for a second or three and ghost images from the top of one monitor flicker on the 2nd until the new task starts and the clocks throttle back up. I've made it go away by creating a profile and manually editing its config file so that the single monitor settings (which it enters despite 2 attached monitors) are no lower than the others. This makes the problem go away, but really...
ratbert1 - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 - link
I suggest reading more than one review before deciding which card is better. I do not get the same results as Anandtech does on the same benchmarks. I have a different platform and get different results. Their bench is useful for getting a rough idea, but there are a lot of other sites to check. Not all show the same AMD scores gotten here.I have tried to use AMD cards in the past. I really have, but with a 5850 I could not get it to work with a DVI connection, and with a 3450 it would bluescreen whenever I played a DVD. Both were sent back. All the other cards I have had (Nvidia) just worked!
I even recently looked at getting a 6950, but too many comments on Newegg were about the lousy drivers(too many for me anyway). I just couldn't do it.
L. - Wednesday, May 18, 2011 - link
Well, there's a fair chance your local hardware dealer sucks, as do all local hardware dealers.Get on the web man, its 2011.
At least you'll get to choose your brand and model for realz ;)
jiffylube1024 - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 - link
The GTX 460, ATI 6850 and 6870 are all still quite solid cards, and these charts prove it. Anyone with a GTX 460 (1GB) that overclocked it to 800-850 MHz basically has a GTX 560.It's nice to see the GTX 560 pushing the GTX 560 series at/under $200.
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I'm impressed with how much the 6870 has improved versus the 5870. When the 6870 came out, it was basically trumped by the 5870 in everything; now, if anything, the 6870 comes out a bit faster.
marc1000 - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 - link
you meant "The GTX 460, ATI 5850 and 5870 are all still quite solid cards"?because 6850 and 6870 are current-gen....
marc1000 - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 - link
Now I can not say to a friend "buy the GTX 560" when he asks if this card if better or equal to R6950. because he will probably buy the cheapest one, wich will have the SAME name, but is slower.ATI/AMD naming is bad, but Nvidia is worse!
LOL_Wut_Axel - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 - link
I don't know where you guys are getting this information, but the Radeon HD 6870 IS NOT at $180. Therefore, you shouldn't let that sway your opinion about this card. The Radeon HD 6870 is a $200 card, as is the GTX 560. Folders and gamers should go for the GTX 560, while people that want higher efficiency and same performance should go for the Radeon HD 6870.That alone leaves me with a very bad taste about this article. I suggest you read the review by Tom's Hardware and TechPowerUp instead.
starfalcon - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 - link
A 6870 can hit $170 on Newegg with a rebate, but $192 or so does seem to be the lowest without any rebates.