NVidia GTX 650Ti Three Way Roundup

There are six tests in 3DMark 11. The four graphics tests use advanced rendering techniques to compile the scene including tessellation, volumetric lighting, depth of field and post processing effects. The physics test uses rigid body simulation to stress the CPU while the combined test features CPU and GPU workloads. The CPU handles rigid-body physics while the GPU is tasked with volumetric lighting, tessellation, post processing as well as simulating soft-body physics using DirectCompute.

Benchmark Settings
Performance Settings - Benchmarks Only

3DMark Vantage is a full DirectX 10 compliant synthetic benchmark designed to test the DirectX 10 abilities of your video card and computing power of your PC.  After the benchmark completes you are given a report card of the performance and are given the option to submit the results to Futuremark where they can be ranked against others with similar hardware.

Benchmark Settings
Performance Settings - Benchmarks Only

Crysis 2 is a CryEngine 3 powered game designed to set the standards for high quality graphics.  The game engine has been upgraded to support DX11 and features Nvidia technologies such as native 3D Vision support.  We are using the Adrenaline Crysis 2 Benchmark Tool and the Central Park map to capture framerates.

Benchmark Settings
Quality Ultra
Anti Aliasing 4x
Map Central Park
API DirectX 11
Edge AA Edge AA
Hi-Res Textures Off

Battlefield 3 is the newest in the Battlefield series made by Dice games and distributed by EA.  The game engine uses some of the latest technologies to make the game look, and feel, as realistic as possible. For our testing we are using FRAPS to monitor the framerate and recorded the first mission of Sword Breaker from the time you exit the troop carrier to the headshot.

Benchmark Settings
Ultra Quality Presets

In space no one can hear you scream.  
The game Aliens vs Predator is based on a long line of games based on the same name which in turn was inspired by the movies and comic books in the series.  AVP is a full DX11 game with some serious Tessellation that will test the limits of any modern GPU.

Benchmark Settings
Texture Quality Very High
Anisotropic Filtering 16
Shadow Quality High
SSAO On
Hardware Tessellation On
Advanced Shadow Sampling On
Anti Aliasing 4x

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat is a first person shooter based around the destruction of a nuclear power plant. It uses the XRAY 1.6 Engine, features DirectX 11 support, and it includes real-time GPU tessellation. The maps feature photo realistic scenes of the region it is made to represent.

Benchmark Settings
Preset Ultra
Renderer Enhanced Full Dynamic Lighting DirectX 11
MSAA 4x
MSAA for A-tested object DX10 Style
SSAO Default
SSAO Quality High
Tessellation Enabled
Test SunShafts

UT3 is the fourth game in the Unreal Tournament series.  It has no story mode gameplay and is exclusively designed for multiplayer action.  The game itself is rather old but the game engine can still be found in most modern games still being released today.  For this benchmark, we're using the UT3Bench tool from Guru3D, and CarbonFire Flythrough to record framerates.  

Benchmark Settings
CarbonFire FlyThrough
DirectX 10
Texture Details 5
Level Details 5

Borderlands 2 follows the story of four new Vault Hunters as they fight to free Pandora from the clutches of Handsome Jack, the brilliant, charismatic, and utterly despicable CEO of the Hyperion Corporation.  The game is based on the Unreal game engine and pushes the envelope when it comes to PhysX particle effects.  Game graphics are done in the cell shaded rendering style which may look like a cartoon but is still quite detailed due to the texturing detail.

Benchmark Settings
PhysX Benchmark
Ultra Presets
PhysX High

There are a few advantages to having an overclocked video card with more video memory, the most important being higher framerates at higher screen resolutions.  As the benchmarks show the Gigabyte N65TOC was the fastest card in the bunch, if only by a little.

Much to our surprise the results are very consistent with only a few solid frames separating  each of the cards.  To keep with our benchmarking suite all of the cards were run with the settings turned up and at un-realistic resolutions (25x16) This was all done to provide a better cross-section.  In the real world you'd need to turn the settings down to get a playable framerate at around 60fps.