NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 560 Ti: Upsetting The $250 Market
by Ryan Smith on January 25, 2011 9:00 AM ESTThe Test
Launching virtually alongside the GTX 560 Ti is NVIDIA’s latest driver branch, Forceware Release 265, with the first WHQL driver being 266.58. Released in beta form earlier this month and in its WHQL form last week, 265 contains the usual mix of documented performance increases (particularly with SLI), bug fixes, and ancillary improvements such as supporting 3D Vision in windowed mode. Most important to our testing are the optimizations that NVIDIA made to their drivers for Civilization V, and their OpenCL drivers; scores in both those areas have gone way up. Elsewhere performance is largely consistent for single card setups, while SLI gains are a bit more consistent.
Please note that for the time being we’re focusing on single card performance, as we have not had the time to update all of our SLI configurations to take in to account these new drivers. We’ll be looking at GTX 560 Ti SLI performance a bit later this week once we’ve revised all of our SLI results.
For our 400 and 500 series cards we’re using the newly released 266.58 drivers, while for the GTX 560 Ti we’re using the beta 266.56 drivers – which as near as we can tell are identical save for the fact that 266.58 didn’t build in GTX 560 Ti support. Meanwhile the GTX 200 series and below continues to use 262.99.
On the AMD side of things we’re adding the newly launched Radeon HD 6950 1GB. Most of the time performance is identical to the 2GB version, but as we’ve seen in our 6950 1GB companion launch article, there is a difference at times.
Finally, for NVIDIA cards all tests were done with default driver settings unless otherwise noted. As for AMD cards, we are disabling their new AMD Optimized tessellation setting in favor of using application settings (note that this doesn’t actually have a performance impact at this time), everything else is default unless otherwise noted.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-920 @ 3.33GHz |
| Motherboard: | Asus Rampage II Extreme |
| Chipset Drivers: | Intel 9.1.1.1015 (Intel) |
| Hard Disk: | OCZ Summit (120GB) |
| Memory: | Patriot Viper DDR3-1333 3 x 2GB (7-7-7-20) |
| Video Cards: |
AMD Radeon HD 6970 AMD Radeon HD 6950 2GB AMD Radeon HD 6950 1GB AMD Radeon HD 6870 AMD Radeon HD 6850 AMD Radeon HD 5970 AMD Radeon HD 5870 AMD Radeon HD 5850 AMD Radeon HD 5770 AMD Radeon HD 4870 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 1GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 768MB NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 |
| Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA ForceWare 262.99 NVIDIA ForceWare 266.56 Beta NVIDIA ForceWare 266.58 AMD Catalyst 10.10e AMD Catalyst 11.1a Hotfix |
| OS: | Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit |
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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?