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Nvidia and AMD (formerly ATI) are certainly fighting for the attention of gaming enthusiasts – with numerous cards around the £200 mark. Back in July Nvidia launched the excellent GeForce GTX 460 for just shy of that amount. More recently, AMD waded in with its Radeon HD 6870 card for around £180 inc VAT; and the Radeon HD 6950 for £220 inc VAT. Now Nvidia is back with the GeForce GTX 560 Ti, again at around £200.
In fact the 560 Ti is available at a range of prices, because Nvidia has encouraged manufacturers to produce overclocked versions of the card. This is so much so that there are few stock versions available. Our initial testing here is with the reference card from Nvidia, which has a core clock speed of 822MHz and its 1GB of GDDR5 memory runs at 1GHz. However, there are cards retailing at the same price as reference cards, but with clock speeds pushed up to 900MHz – such as the Palit GeForce GTX 560Ti Sonic Edition.
Clock speed isn’t everything in a graphics card, but you should certainly regard performance figures here as a baseline. Of course, you could use a free online tool, such as MSI Afterburner to overclock the card yourself, as we did with some impressive results – see below.
Even in its reference form, there’s no doubting that the GTX560 is a big step up over its predecessor. The base clock speed is up by 145MHz from 675MHZ and memory is up by 100MHZ from 900MHz. Just as important is the use of all eight streaming multiprocessors, as only seven were in use in the GTX 460. This gives an additional 48 stream processors for greater parallel processing power.
We still keep our old Call of Duty 4 test around, as it’s useful for gauging the increase in performance over a long time, and for getting meaningful figures out of low-end cards and integrated chips. For cards of this pedigree though it’s a walk in the park now, scoring 87.8fps at Full HD resolution, even with 4x anti-aliasing enabled.
A more serious test is the still challenging DX10 flag bearer – Crysis. The stock GeForce GTX 560 Ti scored 52.7fps (again at 1,920×1,080 with 4x AA and high detail settings), which puts it squarely between the HD 6870 at 46.6fps and the HD 6950 with 59.6fps – so performance is following price here. To test the cards DX11 credentials we used the Stalker: Call of Pripyat benchmark. With 42.9fps at 1,920×1,080 with 4x AA it outpaced HD 6870 with 38.8fps, but was well behind the HD 6950 with 49.8fps.
However, by pushing the card up to 900MHZ core clock and 1,050MHz memory clock (equivalent to the £200 Palit card we mentioned above) produced a score of 45.8fps in Stalker. We then went further, with the card running stably at 950MHz and 1,100MHz, and managing an impressive 48.5fps – just shy of the HD 6950’s 49.8fps. This card is ripe for overclocking then, and those who are happy to fiddle with the settings should get an appreciable speed boost from it.
The card itself is nothing to write home about. It’s fairly compact at 230mm long, and so should fit in all but the most compact cases. There’s the usual pair of DVI outputs plus a mini HDMI port with support for all the latest HD standards plus HDMI 1.4a for 3D video and gaming. It does require two 6-pin power connectors, but only draws 190W at peak and even when overclocked the stock fan was reasonably quiet and kept everything nice and cool.
If you’re looking to spend exactly £200 on a graphics card then the GeForce GTX 560 Ti is an excellent choice. AMD’s offerings on either side aren’t shown up by this newcomer when you look at stock performance, but if you buy a tweaked card, or are happy to play with the clock settings yourself, then the GTX 560 just noses its way ahead of the competition on either side.
AMD has made an attempt to spoil Nvidia’s party, though. Today it announced a 1GB version of the HD 6950 – which until now only shipped in a 2GB configuration. It didn’t announce any UK pricing yet, but it should go head-to-head with the 1GB GTX 560 Ti. We’ll bring you a full review as soon as possible.
