by Rob Williams on January 26, 2011 in Graphics & Displays
After being hidden for the past eight years, NVIDIA has brought back the “Ti” name for its GeForce GTX 560 Ti. The GeForce4 Ti 4200, introduced in 2002, was a card that offered both great pricing and superb performance. NVIDIA looks to recreate the same sort of excitement with its GTX 560 Ti, but has it succeeded?
Although we generally shun automated gaming benchmarks, we do like to run at least one to see how our GPUs scale when used in a ‘timedemo’-type scenario. Futuremark’s 3DMark 11 is without question the best such test on the market, and it’s a joy to use, and watch. The folks at Futuremark are experts in what they do, and they really know how to push that hardware of yours to its limit.

Similar to a real game, 3DMark 11 offers many configuration options, although many (including us) prefer to stick to the profiles which include Performance, and Extreme. Depending on which one you choose, the graphic options are tweaked accordingly, as well as the resolution. As you’d expect, the better the profile, the more intensive the test. The benchmark doesn’t natively support 2560×1600, so to benchmark with that, we choose the Extreme profile and simply change the resolution.



Although I don’t much care for synthetic benchmarks, I hate to admit that 3DMark 11 tends to scale quite well with a GPU’s raw performance, and in the case here, AMD’s card does stay a fair bit ahead of NVIDIA’s GTX 560 Ti – about 12.5~16.6%.