Have you been to a party where you met that guy? You could be talking about anything, driving on the freeway, or eating a hot dog, and he'd one-up you. It's guaranteed that guy drove 100mph into oncoming traffic and threw hot dogs (with mustard on them) at the wildly swerving cars. AMD and Nvidia are both that guy. And in this case, I love him. This time around, Nvidia was set to rain all over AMD with the newly released the GeForce GTX 560 Ti. Priced at $249, it would replace the immensely popular GeForce GTX 460 and provide considerably more performance. Then, AMD came along and added a lightning storm to the mix with the release of the Radeon HD 6950 1GB priced at $259.

　　GeForce GTX 560 Ti The GeForce 560 Ti features the same benefits that the GeForce 500 and 400 series offer, but the chipset has been considerably refined to provide greater performance with reduced power consumption. To sum up recent Nvidia GPU history, the GF100 chipset made up Nvidia's Fermi chip, which consisted of the GeForce GTX 480 and 470. Fermi was quick, but it gulped down power and boiled everything within inches of it. Given some time, Nvidia revamped the GF100 into the GF104 (aka GeForce GTX 460) and GF110 (aka GeForce GTX 580). Now, we have the GF114, which gives us the GeForce GTX 560 Ti. Basically, we get all of the goodies (DirectX11, PhysX, 3D support) but none of the messy heat concerns.

　　The Specs:

　　GeForce GTX 560 Ti

　　$259

　　822MHz Core Clock

　　384 CUDA Cores

　　1GB GDDR5

　　1GHz Memory Clock

　　By comparison, the GeForce GTX 460 came with 336 CUDA cores clocked at 675MHz and 1GB of GDDR5 memory at 900MHz.

　　The GeForce GTX 560 Ti uses a modest 170W and requires the use of two 6-pin PCI Express power connectors. It comes in at 9 inches in length, which is slightly longer than the GeForce GTX 460. Nvidia representatives mentioned that the GeForce GTX 560 Ti is an exceptional overclocker and many board partners would also roll out video cards with significant clock bumps. We've already seen overclocked cards (900MHz core) at retailers with no price premium at all.

　　Radeon HD 6950 1GB

　　AMD's Radeon HD 6950 1GB is almost identical to the original Radeon HD 6950 2GB part with one exception: the amount of RAM. Reducing the available amount of RAM allows the company to drop the price of the card without affecting performance in unconstrained scenarios. Unless you're running exceedingly high resolutions (like those found in Eyefinity setups) and massive amounts of antialiasing, there's little chance you'd notice the difference.

　　The Competitive Landscape

　　$289 - Radeon HD 6950 2GB

　　$269 - Radeon HD 6950 1GB

　　$259 - GeForce GTX 470

　　$249 - GeForce GTX 560 Ti

　　$239 - Radeon HD 6870

　　We tested the GeForce GTX 560 Ti and pit it against the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, as we didn't have a 1GB card on hand. We also tested it against the Radeon HD 6850 and GeForce GTX 470, and then we tossed in the GeForce GTX 460 to see how far Nvidia has come.

　　GeForce GTX 560 Ti Performance Tests When compared to the GeForce GTX 460, the GeForce GTX 560 Ti kicks it to the curb in every test. In Lost Planet 2 the GeForce GTX 560 Ti pulled away with a large 25% performance increase. It comes as no surprise that the GeForce GTX 560 Ti wipes the floor with the Radeon HD 6870. The GeForce GTX 470 provides stiff competition, but we'd side with the GeForce GTX 560 Ti because it has none of the noise or heat concerns and performs better in most of the tests. The only real competition comes from the Radeon HD 6950 2GB and, by relation, the Radeon HD 6950 1GB. They trade blows and perform similarly, which makes it a draw in our books. AMD countered Nvidia quite well with the release of the Radeon HD 6950 1GB card, essentially nullifying outright dominance of this highly contested price point for either company.

　　Test System: Core i7 980x, Asus Rampage III Extreme, 6GB OCZ DDR3, Seagate 750GB 7200.11, Windows 7 64-bit. Video card drivers - Catalyst 11.1a beta, Forceware 266.58.