NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 560: The Top To Bottom Factory Overclock
by Ryan Smith on May 17, 2011 9:00 AM ESTMass Effect 2
Electronic Arts’ space-faring RPG is our Unreal Engine 3 game. While it doesn’t have a built in benchmark, it does let us force anti-aliasing through driver control panels, giving us a better idea of UE3’s performance at higher quality settings. Since we can’t use a recording/benchmark in ME2, we use FRAPS to record a short run.
With Mass Effect 2, AMD and NVIDIA are once again closer to parity, with NVIDIA generally coming out ahead this time. The GTX 560 Mid has a small 3% lead over the 6870, however the 6950 more than keeps its distance from even the best overclocked GTX 560.
Interestingly, among NVIDIA’s lineup the GTX 560 Mid doesn’t do nearly as well compared to the GTX 460 1GB as it normally does. In this case it only has a 14% advantage, well below what it usually has. At the same time the GTX 560 Ti is only 3% ahead of the GTX 560 Mid, which is also lower than normal. Given the insensitivity ME2 seems to have to core clocks and functional units, it looks to be memory bandwidth limited, in which case the GTX 560 Series more limited memory bandwidth gains versus the GTX 460 series means they don’t accumulate quite as big of a lead. The pressure on the memory bandwidth appears to be resolution related though, at least to some extent: the gaps do widen back up once we go to 1680.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
66 Comments
View All Comments
Grooveriding - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 - link
Would be nice to see a comparison of the 560 to the 460 both at the same clockspeeds.Looking at this review, they will perform exactly the same at the same clocks. But it would be nice to see the comparison none the less.
xxtypersxx - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 - link
I agree, it seems to be a pretty standard refresh except whereas 460's tend to top out around 850mhz, these make it much closer to 1ghz.I hope the all of the manufacturers learned their lesson from the rash of dying 460's a few months after launch and included heatsinks on the VRM's like Asus did. These GF114/GF104 cards draw too much current when overclocked for the manufacturer's to leave the mosfets naked as they did with most launch 460's.
I also liked how the clock scaling was presented in the review, this is a good way to handle the non-standardized speeds. I'm sure you'll get the standard comment whiners screaming bias, but at this point I'm convinced they will do this whenever you show an Nvidia card even power on correctly.
L. - Thursday, May 19, 2011 - link
I'm pretty sure they didn't learn too much, seeing what happened to tdp-control on the 590 ... (i.e. nerf the card else it's gonna blow up) - quite normal though, trying to put two 350 watt gpu's on the same board was a retarded idea, since it's not supposed to be a hairdryer.iGas - Sunday, July 10, 2011 - link
I agree.Would be nice to see a direct comparison clock for clock. And, perhaps a comparison with the 470, and 480 at base clock and OC.
PS. My MSI GTX 460, humming along perfectly at 940mhz (and it did broke into 1011mhz territory).
DarknRahl - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 - link
Larger resolutions would be handy.Stuka87 - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 - link
It would be interesting to see them tested on a 27" display, but most single card setups fall on their face at that resolution (2560 x 1440).L. - Thursday, May 19, 2011 - link
Well that's where you see AMD cards (2GB) get some more points.But as discussed .. makes more sense to have 2* 1080p instead, financially.
michaelheath - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 - link
Why? Nvidia pretty much said last week that the target market for the GTX560 was users who want an affordable card to play games at 1080p resolution. Who would buy a $200 graphics card to play on a $1000+ 2560 x 1440/1600 display anyway? If you have that much money in your pockets for a high-quality display, why would you skimp out on the graphics card?Ushio01 - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 - link
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prod...Only £440 ($660).
L. - Wednesday, May 18, 2011 - link
It is clearly dumb to think resolutions will stay at the same level for eleventy beelion years.Anyone who has a good monitor wants to make use of it and might want to know how it's going to work.
Besides, your 1000 bucks figure is like 3x the price for some of the cheapest 2560* .
And, 200 bucks is not exactly "skimping out" on the gfx ...