NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 560: The Top To Bottom Factory Overclock
by Ryan Smith on May 17, 2011 9:00 AM ESTMetro 2033
The next game on our list is 4A Games’ tunnel shooter, Metro 2033. Metro is quite a resource intensive game, and if Crysis is a tropical GPU killer, then Metro would be its underground counterpart.
With Metro the GTX 560 Mid has finally caught up to the 6870, with the two tying at 29.5fps at 1920. The 6900 series does quite well at this game though, leading to the 6950 taking a solid lead over even our overclocked ASUS GTX 560.
Meanwhile as compared to NVIDIA’s lineup, this is another game where the GTX 560 Mid does well relative to a number of NVIDIA cards. The lead over the GTX 460 is at 22%, while the GTX 560 Ti only has a 7% lead of its own. As for the ASUS GTX 560, it ends up in an interesting situation of its own: it beats the GTX 560 Ti, and this is without any additional overclocking on our part. On paper it takes a 940MHz GTX 560 Mid (7 SMs) to beat a GTX 560 Ti (8 SMs), and in this case Metro is shader bound enough to make it happen. This really may be the biggest threat that these factory overclocked GTX 560s pose to anyone: making the GTX 560 Ti redundant.
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DanNeely - Wednesday, May 18, 2011 - link
Where exactly are you finding a $300ish 2560x monitor? IIRC even the best sales Dell had on refurb 3007's only dropped as a low as $800ish, and with the potential inventory of off lease 3007's mostly gone by now and the 3008 and 3011's being significantly more expensive deals that good aren't likely to repeat themselves in the future.L. - Thursday, May 19, 2011 - link
My mistake you two ;)I was thinking about a lcd pannel from idunnowho that had 2xyz * something resolution and that was dirt cheap .. obviously 2560*1440 aren't common at all and overpriced.
On the other hand, you could make the argument for a dual monitor setup below 400 bucks that spans more pixels and thus makes more use of the gfx.
Stas - Wednesday, May 18, 2011 - link
You fail once again. You plan on keeping this card until 20" screens hit 2560x1600/1440? It will probably only be... oh, idk... 10 years?And $330 for a decent 2560 screen? Links plz.
L. - Thursday, May 19, 2011 - link
Yes sir, I would like to be agressive to you to ?On the other hand ... 10 years ??
My Amoled screen on my n900 has a dpi small enough to cram more than 4*full HD on a 20" pannel, something that will happen soon enough as the oled processes mature.
Again, my mistake on the monitor price, memory error.
L. - Thursday, May 19, 2011 - link
Who would buy a 200 bucks card to play on a single 150 bucks monitor when the whole config costs 700+ bucks ?200 bucks is A_DECENT_AMOUNT_OF_MONEY for a GFX, it means you're a gamer (maybe a poor one though) and it means you might be interested in dual screen (meh you spent 700 bucks on the tower, why not 2*150 for dual 22" 1080p monitors ?).
L. - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 - link
I'm seeing quite a trend with AMD stuff getting better scores (relatively) on more recent and demanding games, and I'm wondering if it would be time to weight games differently for a better comparison.For example here, on the important/demanding/modern games (let's take Metro 2033 and Crysis to have undisputable arguments here), the 560 doesn't ever come close to a 6950 and only the best version can beat the 6870 by almost nothing.
If somebody buys a gfx today, it might be to use it for at least another year, and in that sense, the weight of less important games should be diminished a lot, including hawx-120fps-fest, other 100+ fps titles and the clearly nVidia-favoring Civ5.
What is important here, is that NOONE has any interest in buying a gtx560 today, because of the following extremely important points :
-> AMD offerings do better in more demanding games, and will thus do better in future games
-> AMD offerings (6950 for example) have more memory, which WILL be used in next-gen games for sure, as for every gen
-> Noone cares if they have 110 or 120 fps in hawx, which is a console game anyway
I believe the use of any PC component for gamers can be summarized to this in the end :
-> can it play this game ? 30+
-> can it play it well ? 60+
Because any of those components will for most people be used 2 years from now, the fact that older / less-demanding games get 110 fps is completely irrelevant, might as well show 557 fps in quake3 as a benchmark...
As a summary, could you anandtech guys please tweak your test list / weighting in order to better inform the less-informed readers of your website ?
It is utter nonsense to state today that a 560Ti "trades blows" with a 6950 or that a factory OC'd 560 "comes close" to a 6950 either.
The one real true fact is the 6950 gets a huge win in all demanding titles, has 1GB more vRAM and can even unlock+OC very easily to levels none of the 560 versions can reach.
nVidia has done some great stuff in the past, but one has to admit that outside of quad-sli gtx580 there is no use in buying anything nVidia this round, as AMD offers better performance + performance/watt at every price point this time around.
There is one argument for nVidia and that argument (no, not the drivers, because you do NOT play on linux) is the nVidia goodies like 3d gaming and other minor stuff.
crimson117 - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 - link
I half agree with you... some of your commentary is good (HAWX lol) but one particular conclusion is not tenable:"AMD offerings do better in more demanding games, and will thus do better in future games"
When Mass Effect 3 comes out, I expect that like Mass Effect 2 it will strongly favor nVidia GPU's - unless they rewrote the entire engine.
New games cannot be classified into demanding vs non-demanding - each game engine has its favorite factors, be it clock speed, memory bandwidth, stream processors, ROP's, etc, so I expect each game will have its favorite card.
formulav8 - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 - link
The thing is, in games that people can actually use the horsepower, the Radeon is the best card.If you care about getting 500fps on Quake3 instead of 450fps, then the GTX is the better card.
lowlymarine - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 - link
The problem is that if they DON'T complete rewrite the entire engine, Mass Effect 3 will continue to be a festival of even mid-range cards breaking 60 FPS. While there's nothing wrong with that per se - ME2 is one of the better-looking games out there despite being not particularly intensive, after all - it still means that nVidia's slight advantage over AMD in that game is meaningless. Compare that to Crysis where even the 6970 falls short of 60 FPS at WUXGA, and the sizable lead AMD carries over the competition there has real, noticeable impact on the game.Stas - Wednesday, May 18, 2011 - link
Correction:New games cannot be classified into demanding vs non-demanding - each game engine has its favorite chip developer. Money and politics will decide performance in certain games.