NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 560 Ti: Upsetting The $250 Market

The 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.