I just bought an Nvidia GTX 560 and a 650 watt power supply. I’ve been using an integrated Nvidia Ge force 7100.
How shall I describe the difference? Words fail me. I can max out every setting on every game I have, and though I can’t see the frame rate, I’m guessing it’s very high. 1360 x 768 resolution. The Half Life 2 Lost coast bench mark was 58.6 fps average.
I’m currently trying to “break” the card, per say. I set up a simple scene with some books, and added 14 spotlights with 4096 buffer size, a hemi and a point. 60 fps (capped at that I guess). Adding a few more kills it - It must be something in blender, as the frame rate difference between 1 spot and 14 is nothing.
Playing “Amnesia, Dark Descent” completely maxed out. Parralax maps, tons of physics. I am nothing short of astonished.
Thanks for the information, 3dmedieval. I’m planning on buying a GTX 560 Ti in a few weeks, (along with a whole bunch of other hardware!) I can’t wait to see what I’ll be able to do with the ti. What do you have for cooling your pc?
There’s the regular GTX 560 TI which is “lame” and sells for around 150-200 Euro and then there is the GTX 560 TI 448 Cores, which is around 230-270 Euro and the card with the latest GPU and the best price to performance ratio for all Nvidia cards.
That said, latest rumors have it that Kepler’ll be announced next week, and is available by 23rd of March. Although it’s unlikely your budget will allow a GTX680, there’ll surely be movement in the pricing for the, at that point in the future, prior generation of cards. I’d at least wait for that.
I meant it more to raise the awareness that there’s a profound difference between the 336Core and the 448Core version. One might see a 448 benchmarked, being unaware of the fact that there are more than one 560TI, buying a 336Core one and then ending up disappointed.
I couldn’t use anymore power at this point, quite honestly. I have a big monitor, but it is only 1360 x 768. The card will support something in the 2000’s for res, so even if I got a bigger monitor I’d be ok. As I said, 14 spot lights at 4096 res…and the TI is even faster apparently. Amnesia is the the most “next gen” game I have, and it runs like a raped ape at max settings. So yes, if you can wait a short time and get a better card for the money, great idea, but damn am I loving this card, Blender loves it too. At any rate, I spent about $250 (when I get my rebate), with the 650 power supply, and that’s all I want to spend and then some.
Cooling - the card has 2 fans, and copper tube heat sinks. Otherwise, I just have a normal fan in the back. I may invest in a more robust fan just for the hell of it. I have not had problems with overheating though.
@Arexma: I know what you meant, and I too think that people should be warned about the two versions of the 560 TI. Both GPUs have the same name and with most manufacturers you will only be able to tell them apart by looking at the specs sheet (I honestly can’t understand why Nvidia didn’t use a different name for the 448 Cores version). It just seemed a bit rude telling 3dmedieval that his new GPU is “lame”.
@3dmedieval: I’m sure your GPU is more than enough for your gaming needs. No one better than you to judge that. However, if you are going to use Cycles as your main renderer, you will start wishing pretty soon you had more CUDA cores, since more CUDA cores means shorter render times in Cycles. That being said, I tried that same GPU on a Dell and found it to be a very decent piece of hardware and a good performer for Cycles rendering.
I’m a realtime guy. Almost no interest in rendering. But anyway, my card isn’t lame as Arexame put it. No matter how you slice it, I can max out any game I have and get 60fps. Not sure why I need any better…
I have similar results with a three year old ATI 4890, 1 GB DDR5. I never had framerate issues.
It runs Crysis maxed out at ~60 FPS at HD-Ready rez (1366x768). As DX12 will be out, before i even think of using/programming DX11, there is no point in upgrading to even more overkill. Visual difference between DX10.1 and DX11 mode looks 2me marginal. Some might want to spend their money elsewhere and try to get their hands on a second hand 4890.
Thanks for the information, 3dmedieval.