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.

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

 

Meet The GTX 560 Ti Crysis: Warhead
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  • ImSpartacus - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link

    Page one, first chart, the 560 Ti is "$149" instead of "$249".

    Although, I kinda prefer the former.
  • alcortez - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link

    ...wow a 460 for negative $160.
    I want in on that. ;)
  • loubarouba - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link

    lol thats definitely an approximately sign (~)...unless of course i was late and has already been edited to that..
  • 7Enigma - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link

    Listed at $149 when you meant to write $249.
  • 7Enigma - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link

    1st chart to clarify.
  • vol7ron - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link

    I think ImSpartacus beat you to it ;)
  • ImSpartacus - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link

    Yeah, I was secretly hoping to be the first to mention that. I feel special!

    .)
  • Rocket321 - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link

    pg. 16 - Series Load Voltage chart has wrong title.
  • 7Enigma - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link

    what's crazy is that when I posted and refreshed the page I was the only comment. It wasn't until page 3-4 of this review (as I was reading after the comment post) that I noticed yours was there so there is some lag between when a post is made and when others see it (even though you see it right away). I wish we had a time stamp feature on the post! :)
  • maniac5999 - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link

    So the GTX 560 Ti has a 4004mhz DATE rate? Wow, it sure gets around. (chart on P1) ;-)

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