NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 560: The Top To Bottom Factory Overclock
by Ryan Smith on May 17, 2011 9:00 AM ESTCrysis: Warhead
Kicking things off as always is Crysis: Warhead, still one of the toughest games in our benchmark suite. Even three years since the release of the original Crysis, “but can it run Crysis?” is still an important question, and for three years the answer was “no.” Dual-GPU halo cards can now play it at Enthusiast settings at high resolutions, but for mid-range cards like the GTX 560, you’re not going to get much better than 40fps at 1080P.
Historically Crysis is a good game for the 6800 series, so even with the clock boost the GTX 560 Mid can’t really keep up with AMD’s offerings. At 38.6fps the gains over the GTX 460 1GB are decent, but it’s only enough to clear the Radeon HD 6850. Clearing the 6870 requires the GTX 560 Ti, or a 950MHz GTX 560 as in the case of our overclocked ASUS card. Meanwhile clearing the 6950 simply isn’t going to happen.
It is interesting to note just how close the ASUS GTX 560 DirectCU II Top gets to the reference clocked GTX 560 Ti however; it’s still 5% behind, but it’s very close to what launched as a $250 card a few months ago. Given that the difference between the GTX 560 and GTX 560 Ti is a single SM, it should be possible for a well overclocked GTX 560 to place near the GTX 560 Ti. Not surprisingly, this is a big factor for why there are so few reference clocked GTX 560 Tis, and so many factory overclocked models.
While AMD does better on average, the minimums tilt away from AMD’s favor. The GTX 560 Mid still trails the 6870, but overall it’s much closer than the average framerate was.
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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.