Galaxy’s GTX 560 Ti GC – Introducing Nvidia’s Titanium Hunter
Unreal Tournament 3 (UT3)
Unreal Tournament 3 (UT3) is the fourth game in the Unreal Tournament series. UT3 is a first-person shooter and online multiplayer video game by Epic Games. Unreal Tournament 3 provides a good balance between image quality and performance, rendering complex scenes well even on lower-end PCs. Of course, on high-end graphics cards you can really turn up the detail. UT3 is primarily an online multiplayer title offering several game modes and it also includes an offline single-player game with a campaign. For our tests, we used the very latest game patch for Unreal Tournament 3. The game doesn’t have a built-in benchmarking tool, so we used FRAPS and did a fly-by of a chosen level. Here we note that performance numbers reported are a bit higher than compared to in-game. The map we use is called “Containment” and it is one of the most demanding of the fly-bys.
Our tests were run at resolutions of 2560 x 1600 and 1920 x 1200 with UT3’s in-game graphics options set to their maximum values. One drawback of the way the UT3 engine is designed is that there is no support for anti-aliasing built in. We forced 4xAA for 2560×1600 and 8xAA for 1920×1200 in each vendor’s control panel; 8xQ for Nvidia to match AMD Graphics’ 8xMSAA settings. We record a demo in the game and a set number of frames are saved in a file for playback. When playing back the demo, the game engine then renders the frames as quickly as possible, which is why you will often see it playing it back more quickly than you would actually play the game. Here is Containment Demo, first at 2560×1600 with 4xAA forced in each vendor’s control panel:
Now at 1920 x 1200 and with 8xAA (8xQ in Nvidia’s Control Panel) forced (not 4xAA as the chart mistakenly reads):
There is absolutely no problem playing this game fully maxed-out with any of our graphics configurations except for the 768MB GTX 460 when 8xQ is forced in the control panel. The HD 5870 catches and passes even the GTX 480 at 1920×1200 although the GTX 580 puts in the best showing at 2560×1600 and the GTX 570 and the GTX 480 trade blows with each other in a pretty even match up. The GTX 560 Ti has no trouble handling the HD 6870.
Waaah! this was one amazing review, excellent job Poppin!
I’m already thinking of upgrading my system 😛
fantastic review gives out the Clear picture which gives out what and there is no Bias of favoring nvidia or ati like we get to see on other sites
great work done !!
Hey, another stellar review–glad to see even more games. You continue to lead the web with by far the most games benchmarked.
Just curious about the Mafia II 2560×1600 results, where GTX 570 is much, much slower than GTX 480.. was it an accident with using different settings, or is it a glitch with newer drivers?
Thank-you!
In Mafia II, the GTX 570 (266.58) and the GTX 480 (263.09) are using different drivers and should not be directly compared to each other. Generally, the brand new GeForce driver set evenly brought overall excellent performance increases over the last set – but with a couple of oddities in my system.
There were three instances (out of 64 benchmarks) where the GTX 570 failed to perform as expected and where I repeated the benchmarks many times and checked and rechecked settings. I would guess that they are driver-related since they did not show in the earlier driver set.
Of course, it is possible that a resolution setting got accidentally changed between the time that I ran the first set and last weeks testing so I will retest these same benches over again. In my follow up article which is going to pit SLI versus CrossFire, we shall use the (same) latest drivers for GTX 480 and GTX 570 (for single and SLI results).
It was a resolution setting. I tested the GTX 480 at 1920×1200, not at 2560×1600. The charts have been corrected and only the competing cards tested with the very latest driver set are compared now.
Thank-you for bring this error to my attention!
“we found the GTX 460 to be just a bit cooler-running than our GTX 460”
Thank-you. Typo Fixed.
“We found the GTX 560 Ti to be just a bit cooler-running than our GTX 460.”
Article word count: 13,316 😛
“And now we test at 1920×1200:”
You then put the graph for 1680×1050 😉