Gadgetory

so I've got what might appear to be kind of a random card on my test bench it's not actually an EVGA 8800 it's an ax soos 8800 GTX with an EVGA ultra cooler on it and there is a very good reason I have this here now it's been about three years since the launch of the 8800 GT and three years is according to invidious internal research anyway about the average upgrade cycle time for a gamer so I want to have a look at what gamers who bought the original DirectX 10 GPUs so that's a full DirectX generation ago that is the 8800 gtx 800 GTS 8800 ultra and really the 8800 GT they all fall into kind of a performance range that's within about 20 to 30 percent of each other what do they get by upgrading to what is now by all appearances the DirectX 11 bang for the buck GPU to have the GTX 560 Ti so here's another interesting point to kind of look at the steam hardware survey actually reveals that to do 72% of gamers are still on DirectX 10 so you can imagine that Nvidia is really hoping that a lot of those guys who upgraded to DirectX 10 you know two to three years ago and are getting to the end of the life cycle of their card are going to upgrade to one of these so let's have a look at what the benefit is of upgrading to a GTX 560 Ti from an older generation card such as this one so I'm loading my saved game called image quality compare and I just want to talk a little bit about what things we are going to be observing here so first of all I want you guys to check out the frame rate in the top right corner so it's up around so this is my image quality compare savegame I want you to notice a few things about it first of all we are running on all medium details this is with the 8800 GTX you can see the frame rate up in the corner is around 50 frames per second now some people would probably argue that this is like too high and the human eye can only see 30fps blah blah blah but personally I do find I notice a difference at higher than 50 fps honestly my ideal is around 60 Plus although 50 is very very playable but I will actually show you guys why so I'm going to do still screenshots for you to compare and you can flip YouTube into 1080p too to really look at it closely but the stuff you're going to want to focus on actually I'm going to go here back to the beginning is that things like anti-aliasing so if you look closely at parts of the image like the trees you're going to notice that with the with the lower image quality settings you're going to have more more jaggies on leaves or on things like the tree trunks you can see there they're quite jagged especially while you're moving the effect is is very noticeable anyway I'm going to sort of demonstrate why I don't believe that 30fps when you're in a still scene is enough because you check check this out okay so as soon as I do something like run around and blow up a barrel boom ik dips so for me I want the framerate to never dip below 30fps because when there's explosions going on and you're moving fast around the map and there's lots of enemy characters being drawn that's exactly the time when you need all of the performance that you can get and if your framerate dips at that critical time you're going to miss a shot or you're going to accidentally drive off a cliff or or whatever whatever can happen while you're not able to properly see what exactly you're doing so here you can see I'm driving and it looks like I managed to cut off the framerate counter in the top there yet so I've got fraps running in the top corner and it's around 40 fps so anyway yes this is all medium details with the 8800 ETX you know what crisis looks great crisis looks great on an 8800 GT X and I'm going to show you guys in a minute how much even more better it can look with a gtx 560 TI okay guys I've got my GTX 560 Ti on the test bench now this is a an Intel Core i7 2600 to 4.7 gigahertz so we shouldn't be seeing too much in terms of CPU bottlenecking now I'm at that very same scene right when I first load my image quality compare save point and you can see we're up around 115 frames per second now there is no image quality difference for running at 115 frames per second versus running at 50 frames per second nothing nada not at all now motion might be a little bit more fluid especially if you're running on a 120 Hertz monitor like the one I have here remember anything about 60 frames per second is not going to really help you out when you're running on a 60 Hertz monitor because it can only display 60 frames per second Wow whereas a 120 Hertz monitor is capable of more so here I'm just going to show you guys like what happens to the framerate when we blow up a barrel instead of dipping down to you know the 35 to 40 range we're dipping down to the 95 range so you won't even feel a dip so what do you do as soon as you start being able to run a game at insane frame rates well you turn up the details so I'm going to turn everything up to high and we're going to do our image quality comparison I'll show you guys the screenshots at the end of the video and we'll see even on an old this is an old title old DirectX 10 title how much of a difference a video card upgrade can make for you if you haven't done one in a few years so I'm loading that very same save game and one thing you guys are probably going to notice right off the bat is that up here my frame rate is a little bit lower than it was when I was running on the 8800 GT X so the reason is that I've turned the details way way up and what I've also noticed about the 560 Ti is that when things get hairy it doesn't dip down nearly to the same degree that the 8800 GT XS so you can see that textures are much much better shadows are softer a lot more dynamic more realistic looking we've got like you know God raised going through the through the light that passes through the trees just way more processing effects the water looks better and even when you know all I walk to close whoops okay well let's try that one more time even when I you know start blowing things up explosions look more realistic and the framerate really doesn't dip down below 35 or so frames per second which is acceptable even when the action gets intense so I'm actually just going to go for my little my little cruise down the road here and I just want to demonstrate that even when things get hairy that my frame rate is going to stay satisfactory now 35 frames per second I would consider more than acceptable for single-player but for a multiplayer game yeah I would probably I would probably compromise some of that image quality for a higher frame rate just to make sure that it's being drawn on my screen before the other guy but in the case of single-player really eye candy is a big part of the experience so you know let's go find some some dudes to kill and then you guys can watch the framerate and please don't watch my terrible gaming skills because yes I'm playing uneasy and yes I'm still not doing that well what are you going to do and now I died so thank you for checking out my video on what kind of image quality increases you can get if you take your old DirectX 10 class video card and upgrade it to the new gtx 560 TI with DirectX 11 and really more than anything else a lot more horsepower so that's how much different it can be even with an older DirectX 10 game image quality screenshot comparison coming actually here's one other interesting tidbit my power consumption was only about wow about 5% higher at its peak with the GTX 560 versus the 8800 GT X so that's just phenomenal you get that much more performance that much better image quality without any our budget when you upgrade to a GTX 560 TI you