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 assus
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 3 years
since the launch of the 8800 GT and 3
years is according to NVIDIA's 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 direct X10 gpus so that's a
full direct X Generation ago that is the
8800 GTX 8800 GTS 8800 Ultra and really
the 8800 GT they all fall into kind of a a performance range that's within about
20 to 30% of each other what do they get
by upgrading to what is now by all
appearances the direct X11 bang for the
buck GPU to have the GTX 560 t I so
here's another interesting point to kind of look at the steam Hardware survey
actually reveals that 72% of gamers are still on Direct
X10 so you can imagine that NVIDIA is really hoping that a lot of those guys
who upgraded to direct X10 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 56t I from an
older generation card such as this one
so I'm loading my save 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
oh so this is my image quality compare
save game I want you to notice a few things about it uh 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 uh too high in the human eye can only see 30
FPS 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 to 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 uh
things like uh anti-aliasing so if you look
closely at uh 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 uh or on things like
the tree trunks you can see there they're quite Jagged especially while
you're moving the effect is um is very
noticeable um 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 it dips so for me I want the frame rate to
never dip below 30 FPS 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 frame rate dips at that
critical time you're going to miss a shot or you're going to accidentally
drive off a cliff or or what 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 uh oh wow it looks like I managed to
cut off the frame rate counter in the top there yeah 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 GTX you know what crisis
looks great crisis looks great on an 8800 GTX 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 2600k processor overclocked to 4.7
GHz 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 notada not at
all now motion might be a little bit more fluid especially if you're running
on a 120 HZ monitor like the one I have here remember anything above 60 frames
per second is not going to really help you out when you're running on a 60 HZ
monitor because it can only display 60 frames per second how whereas a 120 HZ
monitor is capable of more so here I'm
just going to show you guys like what happens to the frame rate 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 direct X10
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 GTX 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 GTX does so you can see that textures are much much better uh Shadows
are softer a lot more Dynamic a lot more realistic looking we've got like you
know God Rays going through the uh through the the light that passes
through the trees just way more processing effects the water looks
better um and even when you know oh I
walked too 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 the frame rate 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 uh 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 I candy is a big
part of the experience so here let's go find some some dudes to kill and then uh
you guys can watch the frame rate and please don't watch my terrible gaming
skills because yes I'm playing on easy 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 direct X10 class video
card and upgrade it to the new GTX 560 TI with direct X11 and really more than
anything else a lot more horsepower so that's how much different it can be even
with an older direct X10 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 GTX so
that's just phenomenal you get that much more performance that much better image
quality without any additional power budget when you upgrade to a GTX 560 TI
bye