Galaxy’s GTX 560 Ti GC – Introducing Nvidia’s Titanium Hunter
Mafia II
Mafia II is a third-person action-adventure video game which is the sequel to Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven. It is developed by 2K Czech and is published by 2K Games and was released last year. Mafia II is set from 1943 to 1951 in Empire Bay which is a fictional city based mostly on San Francisco and New York City along with some influences from Chicago and also Detroit. Mafia II is a gritty drama which chronicles the rise of World War II veteran Vito Scaletta who joins the Falcone Crime Family and becomes a ‘made’ man. There are 15 chapters in the game and over two hours of game engine generated cutscenes.
Mafia II makes extensive use of Nvidia’s PhysX whose full effects are seen smoothly only by playing on a PhysX-enabled GeForce and preferably with a second video card dedicated to it. For this article, we used the full retail game with Mafia II’s built-in benchmark with the highest settings for 2560×1600 and 1920×1200 – without PhysX – and this time we will reserve comment until after both charts. First we test at 2560×1600.
Now at 1920×1200:
The GTX 580 is the fastest followed by the HD 6970. However, the GTX 560 Ti falls slightly behind even the HD 6870. As a note, enabling AA and high PhysX together will bring a GTX 580 to its knees even at 1920×1200 although medium PhysX settings are quite playable.
(Update: Please note that the GTX 480 was run on the last driver set and the extreme disparity at 2560×1600 was due an incorrect resolution setting. The new charts (above) are now correct.)
If you want to run Mafia II with AA and high PhysX settings on, consider getting a dedicated PhysX card. This covers our DX9 games; let’s move on to DX10 and DX11 games.
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 😉