Performance of GPU in Civ V

[Dibbler]

Hello

I am reading this comparison between the GTX480 and GTX560Ti in Civ V...

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/309?vs=330

(Blue for 480 and Black for 560)

I have a GTX 460 and with that card against the 480...

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/309?vs=313

(Blue again for the 480)

why does the 560Ti seem to perform quite a bit better than the 480 at 1680x1050, even the 460 that I own seems to do better than the 480..?

I am using Civ V as my example as that is the game that I'm playing a great deal at the moment. I was hoping that if I could justify any change at all in the GPU to try and improve the performance at the late era gameplay then the 480GTX would have offered that over the 560Ti (I play at 1680x1050). But it seems that at that resolution the 560Ti would be a better choice and yet it would have given me the impression of just a small incremental difference of not being worth it as an upgrade from 460GTX.
I am seeing the 480GTX at around thee same price as the 560Ti.

 

[Veliko]

If your problems are occurring towards the end of the game then it sounds more like a RAM or CPU bottleneck. This sort of thing happened in Civ 4 before they released a few patches to improve performance.

 

[Dibbler]

Thanks I appreciate that the calculation time taken could well be that of my CPU and RAM being used. At late game era I find that my overclocked E8500 running at 4Ghz is utilised at around 80% and the RAM used by the game rarely goes above 1.7GB of my 4GB installed. The panning around the screen can at times be problematic, especially on large and huge maps.
My overclocked 1GB 460GTX is being used up to 85% utilisation and all its 1GB of memory is being taken.

I just couldn't understand from those graphs how well the 560Ti performs against that of the 480GTX.

 

[Veliko]

Having had a quick look at the benchmark graphs they don't actually state what stage of the game they were performed on - I wouldn't have thought they would be panning around or anything like that.

I get similar issues when playing Civ 5 as well and I would imagine everyone is.

 

[Dibbler]

I suppose if the game had, for example, a benchmark directly built in like World in Conflict it would take the ambiguity out on how those benchmarks results were achieved.

Civ V has three benchmarks which can be activated and then ran via shortcut but again it does not go into any detail of those numbers on the graphs which might help to explain the differences between the 560Ti and 480.

Hopefully the soon to be launched Feb patch might well address the long turn times issue, as that has been mentioned in the patch notes.

 

[AtenRa]

Could be the drivers ?? or the numbers are from an older chart

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4135/nvidias-geforce-gtx-560-ti-upsetting-the-250-market/9

GTX560 review

 

[bryanW1995]

My i7 920 @ 4.0 paired with a gtx 460 768 bogs down on larger maps in late-game as well. I also game at 1680x1050, and believe me when I say that I've played a LOT of Civ5. I've found that if the game started out playing ok but bogged down at the end I can usually get away with detail reductions and gameplay will improve. don't switch tessalation off, just move it to low. Something interesting though, I can play a large/standard map just fine, or a standard/epic map just fine, but if I play a large/epic map or any combo of a huge map the game is just plain laggy even at the beginning. and don't trust task manager, mine just shows me at around 40% or so utilization, that's BS. So overally, we game at the same resolution, but you have a better gpu and a slower cpu than I do.

Summary: upgrade your cpu, either to a 2500/2600k or a bulldozer when those come out.

 

[Dibbler]

the driver thing could be a good reason as to the 480's lack of performance as I think that Civ V's performance was greatly increased at a certain revision of NVidia's drivers. If that is the case then you need to be wary when using the comparative feature of those tests.

It is not the time between turns that concerns me too much in this context. It was the panning of the map in the late era but I tend to think that is more of a Civ V issue that needs to be addressed rather than hope a GPU replacement is going to help and resolve it.

 

[jibberegg]

Yeah, the Forceware Release 265 drivers provided a huge boost to NVIDIA... http://www.anandtech.com/show/4135/nvidias-geforce-gtx-560-ti-upsetting-the-250-market/9

 

[bryanW1995]

man that's annoying, I had to roll back my driver to get opengl support, going back and forth is going to be a real pita.