NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 560 Ti w/448 Cores: GTX 570 On A Budget
by Ryan Smith on November 29, 2011 9:00 AM ESTHAWX, Civ V, Battlefield BC2, & STALKER
HAWX is one of the oldest games in our current test suite, and as a result high framerates are a common occurrence. Even at 2560 everything can top 100fps, but there is still a clear preference in the results for NVIDIA’s cards. At 1920 the GTX 560-448 is 9% ahead of the 6970, while the fact that it has the same number of ROPS as the GTX 570 keeps it extremely close to NVIDIA’s next step up.
As AMD has still not implemented multithreaded command lists – an optional part of the DX11 API that CivV heavily uses – NVIDIA continues to do much better than AMD here. At 1920 the GTX 560-448 is ahead of the 6970 by 36%, or 16fps. Within NVIDIA’s product lineup things are rather consistent, with Zotac’s overclock closing the gap on the GTX 570.
Looking at Battlefield: Bad Company 2, BC2 continues to provide some of the most balanced results in our test suite. The GTX 560-448 beats the 6950, but only by a little over 1fps. Compared to NVIDIA’s lineup the GTX 560-448 is a few percent behind the GTX 570, with Zotac’s overclock closing the gap. Though at only 1920, any of these cards can average better than 60fps.
Meanwhile our BC2 waterfall benchmark shakes things up. Everything drops below 30fps, with the GTX 560-448 and other NVIDIA GF11o cards weathering better than AMD’s cards.
Our next benchmark is the STALKER: Call of Prypriat benchmark. On cards with 1GB of VRAM or less it can be overly taxing, but with more than 1GB of VRAM the bottleneck shifts to rendering. At this point it’s another balanced benchmark, with the GTX 560-448 placing slightly ahead of AMD’s 6950, and very close to the GTX 570. Zotac’s overclock can’t close the gap, but it’s close.
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Jamahl - Tuesday, November 29, 2011 - link
In your 560 Ti review you said that it was "a bit faster" than the 6950. What's changed? Maybe AMD's drivers are helping to pull the card away because it's clearly ahead here with the same games being tested.http://www.anandtech.com/show/4135/nvidias-geforce...
"The GTX 560 Ti ultimately has the edge: it’s a bit faster and it’s quieter than the 6950"
Perhaps you should do an article on that one? You know you were one of the very few sites on the web who actually found the 560 Ti to be faster than the 6950 in the first place?
I wonder why that was.
Ryan Smith - Tuesday, November 29, 2011 - link
If you haven't already, I'd invite you to take a look at Bench, our online benchmark database. The video card numbers are periodically revised for newer articles, which is what you're seeing here.The latest data we have for the 6950 vs. the GTX 560 Ti: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/293?vs=330
Jamahl - Wednesday, November 30, 2011 - link
Glad to see you are keeping those updated and thanks for the reply.My point was, what happened to the 560 Ti's lead from your initial review? Looking at that bench now the 6950 is a good bit ahead.
Drivers?
Ryan Smith - Wednesday, November 30, 2011 - link
Yes, I'd say that's a fair assessment. Looking at 1920 between January and NovemberCrysis: 48.6->51.4
BF: 58.3->68.9
HAWX: 108->119
CivV: 34.8->40.1
BC2: 61.8->69.2
Etc.
Note that the 560 Ti was launched only a month after the 6900 series, so AMD only had a short amount of time to optimize their 6900 drivers between the 6900 launch and then. Whereas they've had another 10 months since then to work on their drivers further. Given the similarities between VLIW4 and VLIW5, if you had asked me for my expectations 10 months ago it's actually more than I thought AMD would get out of optimizations.
Meanwhile the 560 Ti has shifted very little in comparison, which is not surprising since the Fermi-lite architecture had been around for over half a year by that point.
The 560 Ti and 6950 still trade blows depending on the game in a very obvious way, but the 6950 is now winning more games and on a pure numerical average is clearly doing better.
Jamahl - Friday, December 2, 2011 - link
Yep that looks like a pretty fair assessment. I was suprised to see the gap open up so clearly.pixelstuff - Tuesday, November 29, 2011 - link
Are these all of the crappy GF110 processors that had manufacturing defects?Ryan Smith - Tuesday, November 29, 2011 - link
Correct. Technically speaking NVIDIA could take perfectly good GF110 GPUs can still make products like this, but it wouldn't make any sense for them to do so. All of these cards would be using GF110 GPUs with 2 defective SMs.Duwelon - Wednesday, November 30, 2011 - link
Your image shows 3 defective SMs. At least i'm assuming it's supposed to be the "new" chip.Ryan Smith - Wednesday, November 30, 2011 - link
Indeed, that was a diagram error on my part. It's been fixed.piroroadkill - Tuesday, November 29, 2011 - link
I'd still regard the 6950 2GB as the best value proposition card, and it has been ever since the launch of the card almost a year ago.Even though I only bought one recently, and heard the extra shaders had been lasered off, this thankfully proved wrong, and one BIOS update later and I have a 6970.
You can't ignore value like that.