£182 inc VAT * nvidia.co.uk • tinyurl.com/3d6wzef
Mid-range graphics cards tend to offer the best value for money, providing adequate performance for most users without emptying their wallets. The GeForce GTX 560 Ti is the dearest option of several mid-range nVidia offerings, and costs around £182 online. While we wouldn't dare to suggest this was an 'affordable' option for gamers, it's significantly less expensive than the top-end GTX 580 (page 67). There are some major differences between this card and nVidia's cheaper GTX 550 Ti (reviewed on the paqe 65). Whereas the GTX 550 Ti is based on the GeForce 116 core and cuts a few corners to keep down the price, nVidia's GeForce 114 core-based GTX 560 Ti has high-spec hardware that ensures consistent performance. In several areas, you can take a GTX 550 Ti specification and double it. This card has almost twice as many transistors, with 1,950 to the GTX 550 Ti's 1,170. It has 384 stream processors compared with 192, and its memory bandwidth has increased by 30 percent to 128Gbps. Crucially, its texture fill rate has almost doubled, which gives the GTX 560 Ti a major performance boost. The GTX 560 Ti delivers smooth framerates in any game you care to play. We recorded 100fps in Battlefield: Bad Company 2 at 1280x1024 pixels, and 72fps at 1920x1080 pixels. The card averaged 93fps and 61fps at the same resolutions in Stalker: Call of Pripyat. In Crysis, our most intensive test, the nVidia recorded just 31fps at a full-HD screen resolution (1920x1080 pixels), but this is still a playable framerate. We're certain that this card will be able to cope with almost any PC game released in the next couple of years. nVidia's GTX 560 Ti is priced to compete with ATI's pricier Radeon HD 6950 (paqe 67), but lagged behind that card in our tests. Factory-overclocked versions of this standard card will narrow the gap somewhat, so shopping around may net you better value. Both cards require two six-pin power connectors from the PSU, although this nVidia model is physically shorter than the ATI. VERDICT: The GTX 560 Ti offers considerably better performance than the 550 Ti, but it's not able to match ATI's more expensive HD 6950. You may find a factory-overclocked version offers better value.
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