Geforce GTX 260-Mixed SLI investigation

**ChrisRay** · 10-03-2008, 10:42 PM

Geforce GTX 260-216 Mixed SLI Investigation

Introduction: Its only been a few months since the GTX 280 and GTX 260 came out. The prices for these cards have dropped significantly in the mean time. With GTX 280 cards able to be found for around 400 dollars and GTX 260 cards as low as 225 if you look in the right places. Its certainly a good time to be a gamer who is upgrading. With that respect. Nvidia has updated their Geforce GTX 260 model. The new card is called Geforce GTX 260-216 and it comes with more shader units and TMUs. I will break down the specs in a bit. The best part about this new release is that its SLI compatibile with the old GTX 260 meaning a current GTX 260 user can pick it up without worries.

The Card

Initial Thoughts: The card itself doesnt look any different from a GTX 260 or even a 280. It does only have two 6 pin connectors so you wont need a fancy power supply to connect this card up. Vendors such as BFG and EVGA will likely be putting labels on the cards and boxes which should help better serve distinguishing the difference between this and a normal GTX 260. Other than looking at the driver itself. There would be no way for me to tell the difference at a quick glance.

216? 192? What: Just by looking at the driver control panel you can clearly see there is a difference between the 2 GPUs. Lets take a closer look at the differences between the cards more detail.

Thoughts: The GTX 260 and GTX 260-216 have the exact same pixel fillrate and bandwith as one another. However thanks to another cluster being disabled. The 260-216 has increased shader throughput and texturing fillrate. This should translate into greater performance in shader limited titles and higher AF performance.

**ChrisRay** · 10-03-2008, 10:43 PM

Test Setup Configuration

Q6600 @ 3.2 Ghz
EVGA Nforce 780I @ 1419 FSB
Corsair XMS2 @ 800 Mhz 4 gigs
Vista 64 Bit
Forceware 178.13

Note: All 260-216 SLI benches are done in a mixed SLI configuration with a standard 260.

Fear Game Tests

Thoughts: Fear is an incredibly fillrate limited title. Even with max settings the extra shader power provided by the GTX 260-216 doesnt provide much of a benefit. The GTX 280 scales nicely due to the additional ROPS and clocks.

Bioshock Game Tests

Thoughts: Bioshock is a little different and shows some more interesting results. As the game responds to the increased shader power of the 260-216. In mixed SLI the 260-216 and standard 260 are slightly faster than a standard 260 SLI configuration.

Unreal Tournament 3

Thoughts: Like Bioshock. UT3 shows more sensitivity to the increased shader power of the newer 260 model. Once again we can see that mixing an old SLI 260 with a new 260 will produce slightly faster framerates than the 260 SLI configuration.

**ChrisRay** · 10-03-2008, 10:45 PM

PhysX Testing

Unreal Tournament 3 PhysX

Thoughts: Using the same physx package that I did with my 9800GTX + preview I overclocked the Q6600 to a clock that will be more likely with current high end hardware. I also included multiple comparisons of different PhysX GPUs. The GPUS scale linearly. The ones with the most stream processors of course being fastest.

Ghost Recon Advanced Warfare 2 PhysX

Thoughts: GRAW 2 is a new benchmark to my test suite. And as new physX benchmarks become available I intend to start including them into my previews. GRAW 2 does not support CPU physX acceleration for advanced physX effects. However with PhysX on maximum settings you can see the first level scales linearly to the amount of stream processors available to each card.

Overall Thoughts and Conclusion: The Geforce GTX 260-216 is just a small upgrade to the GTX 260. Users with Geforce GTX 280/260 cards are obviously not going to be out rushing to get this card. However as with all things it does provide a small performance boost in the 300 dollar segment which will likely trickle down to the 250 price segment soon. I have to say I am very pleased that Nvidia chose to allow this card to be SLIable with the old 260. It will help prevent unneccasary confusion when adding a second 260 card. And as seen here there are no real downsides to mixing and matching an old and a new. There's actually a slight performance boost. This is much like the 9800GTX + and 9800GTX cards. If you are opting to mix and match your 260 cards. Put the more powerful one in the primary slot. As you'll get increased CUDA performance as well as single GPU gaming performance for those rare instances when SLI wont scale. Overall if your looking for a GTX 260 card now this is the one to look for. However if your finding better deals on the 192 shader version then you wont lose much by going that route. The GTX 260 remains my favorite card release this generation for multi GPU setups while the GTX 280 is my favorite single card setup currently available.