News GeForce GTX 560 sneak peek

I loved that card!

 

I concede to the reality of your observation.
Everybody has been pushing my buttons today, which may have more to do with a general dissatisfaction at having to return to my normal routine after a break, rather than as a result of the elevated level of interpersonal and environmental chaos I found upon my return...grr...but I can't be certain. Correlation and causation and all that.

Once you realise that it is actually a made up descriptive system for marketing purposes that bear no resemblance to a system of benchmarked results then you don't feel so bad about it.
I understand your point, and to a certain degree I agree as well, but AMD had a difficult decision to make. They had a good naming system in place, but there was a requirement to reposition the line-up to accommodate the entry level Fusion GPUs (you notice that AMD will say that the APUs include a named GPU, eg. the E350 includes a HD6310 GPU) as well as an entirely new level of GPU (the HD68xx) and this pushed the discrete cards up. It was either make a new system (everyone would scream) or modify the existing one (everyone would scream).

But a look at the price points of the HD5870 and HD6870 would show anyone that they were not equivalent class cards. Everyone was screaming (me included) that the price/performance gap between the HD5770 and the HD5850 was too large (let's face it, it was a yawning chasm!). Now there are comfortable gaps between the HD6770 - HD6870 - HD6870.

It isn't perfect, but it beats Nvidia's seemingly random assortment of letters/numbers. It seems that the GTX is creeping lower and lower. Now we have a GTX550. What ever happened to GTS at the mid-range, and GT at the bottom? GTX doesn't mean anything any more, and the Ti never did mean anything.

 

I fail to see the point of this card.. You have the 460 which is bargain these days, two of those will smash retry much anything.. With similar performance to a 580..
The 560ti is a step up from the 460, and the 550 performs just below the 460 if I recall.. And I mean just..
Is there really a big enough performance gap between the 460 and 560ti to warrant this extra tier? I'm pretty sure the gainward 460 goes like hell edition performs within about 1-2% of the 560ti as it is...

nVidia just needs a way to get rid of their low grade gpus, but calling it the 560? That's just downright confusing.. Much the same as the 460SE was.. And I believe this is gonna be the same type of difference. GTX555 would have been more appropriate so at least the uninformed can tell there's a difference..

PC hardware naming conventions are getting beyond a joke...

 

So Intel and AMD were having a beer and Nvidia wanted to join them, but they were refused as none of their line up was confusing enough..........enter the 560. You know, the newer shitter version with essentially the same name as a previous superior version..

 

It never gets too old...
Everyone and their grandma have an expert opinion about naming scheme perceived by a brain dead zombie noob.

Scheme which looks like this:
GTX 450 < GTX 550 Ti < GTX 460 < GTX 560 < GTX 560 Ti

Now will zombie noob please stand up, and instead of giving advices to poor poor Nvidia, kindly explain what's so confusing to him? Other then 190AD being more recent then 1900BC.

Because I have a hunch everything would be so much clearer for him if he just looked at the product prices, learned to Google, or ask anyone with a working brain half to assist him with his purchase.

 

I do like the resolution 1920x1080, so lets just make it standard for gaming so that we'll atleast have one standard, and one less thing for the softwaremakers to think about.

I wonder when we'll see the first benches of BF3, I gotta know what to buy.

 

I think I agree with this. Although I have read it twice and still am not entirely sure what Noisiv is saying, I *think* he is saying that its not that difficult to understand.

The funny thing is, that the "older" PC'ers hanker after the naming schemes that were so much more understandable 4 years + ago.
But they weren't. Back then we had the 8800GTS, 8800GTX, 8800GTX Ultra, 8800GT and 8800GS. And thats BEFORE nvidia went a bit daft and released the 9800GT (which ws an 8800GT) and the 9800GTX+ which then became the GTX250.

When we buy a car, we go out and buy; say; a Golf. We can buy the 2.0 in various "flavours" such as the Golf 2.0Twist, Golf 2.0S, Golf 2.0Match, Golf 2.0GT, Golf 2.0R and Golf 2.0GTi. All of them are named Golf, have a 2.0 engine, and all of them cost different amounts and have different levels of performance and kit. And you wouldn't expect someone to go out, buy a golf S and complain they thought they were getting 0-60 in under 8seconds with leather as standard.
The letters after the name tell you what to expect from that car, just like the letter after the card name tell you wether you are getting a top level or mid level version of that card.

It only odd because we haven't had that naming for a while, Nvidia went for mid numbers such as the GTX465, which confused everyone, and now they've changed back and people are still crying foul.
At first I too thought it was silly to name another card the 560, but in retrospect is it really that bad?

 

pregnant women dont make this kind of drama when it comes to giving names

 

There was no mid-cycle refresh of the 5xxx - the 5890 never existed. There was also a 4860, which had no 5xxx equivalent.

They haven't been able to make up their minds with the dual GPU cards either. First two generations, 3870X2 and 4870X2, makes perfect sense. Then they decided to make the x9xx into the dual card, so a HD5870X2 became a HD5970. But then they got tired of that, and made a 6970X2 into a 6990. Personally, I think that it would be simpler to just retain the X2 on the end, but maybe it is something that was triggered by nVidia, who switched from a 9800GX2 to denote a dual 9800 to a GTX 295 to denote a dual 275. Perhaps AMD felt that they needed an x9xx card, because nVidia did. The 6790 also kinda bugs me, as it's really a crippled 6870, not the same chip as the 6750 or 6770.

I personally wasn't a fan of nVidia moving the naming around the midrange. The 460 got confusing with the 460 1GB, the 460 768mb, and the 460 SE 1GB. Now the "Ti" has been revived. I thought the GT/GTS/GTX scheme made sense without any suffices.

The OCD engineer in me believes in a very consistent naming scheme, but in reality, AMD and nVidia are concerned with selling cards. If there is a gap in their lineup, and they are losing business, they will find a way to fill it. Just look at how the 460 shook things up for ATI. The 5830 was crappy, and there was nothing between a $150-170 HD5770 and a $270-300 HD5850. The GTX460 just swept in and filled that huge gap. And, of course, within a couple months, AMD rolls out the HD6850 and HD6870 right in that gap. More variety can be a good thing. That critical $175-250 price range had nothing but the crippled HD5830 and GTX465 last generation, and now with a combination of price drops and new cards, there are the 460, 470, 560, 6850, 6870, and 6950 all in that price range, and all good cards.

 

Most people are complaining about the naming conventions, tbh I'm not worried about that. What I don't get is why we need yet another card in this performance/price range.
As I said in my previous post, is the gap between a factory OC 460 and the reference 560ti really big enough to warrant another card in the middle? I need to re read a review I found that compared a gtx 460 OCd @ 800/4000 to the stock 560ti, and from memory it may have been as little as 3-4% difference. Eg, 57fps vs 60.. Would you really notice that?

 

It's become an arms race for every frame, literally every frame.

 

560 ti is much faster then a 460 1GB now, I was surprised myself but look at any recent reviews.

The 460 is actually looking really weak compared to the cards in it's price range. It's riding off word of success alone at this point selling for $150-180, when a Sapphire 5850 mops the floor with one for $135. Even the 6850 is generally better at everything but HAWX and 1 or 2 other nvidia games.