Nvidia today announced the GTX 560 Ti, an updated and beefed up version of the GTX 460, which Nvidia is marketing as a “sweet spot” GPU, much like the 8800GT in the days of yore. Nvidia seized the GPU high end—again—with the introduction of the GTX 580, which was based on a re-engineering of the Fermi-based GTX 480. Then the GTX 570 showed up as a replacement for the GTX470, itself a stripped-down 480. You get the idea.
The GTX 560 Ti is a reengineering of the GTX 460, to which we gave high marks in late 2010 for its power and competitive price. The GTX 460 boasted 336 CUDA cores, and was stock-clocked at 650MHz. The GTX 460 overclocked well; factory-OC’d models like Gigabyte’s 715MHz GV-N460OC-1GI GTX 460 easily trounced their price-point competition until the introduction of the Radeon HD 6870. The GTX 560Ti kicks the CUDA cores up to 384 and the stock clock up to 822MHz, with factory-overclocked cards hitting north of 900MHz and as high as the 1GHz mark.
The GTX 560 Ti’s stock configuration includes 8 streaming multiprocessors (one more than the GTX 460), 64 texture units (8 more than the 460), 32 ROP units (the same as the 460), and 1GB of GDDR5 at 1002MHz. The TDP is 170W.
The GTX 560 Ti features full DirectX 11 support, as well as Nvidia-specific technologies like PhysX, CUDA Compute and 3DVision.
The reference board is nine inches long and takes two six-pin power connectors. It’s a dual-slot card with two Dual-Link DVI ports and one Mini HDMI port. Nvidia’s MSRP for the stock-clocked GTX 560 Ti is $249; this puts it in direct competition with ATI’s Radeon HD 6870. Nvidia told us that they expected nearly 30 partner SKUs for the 560 Ti, both stock and overclocked, at a variety of price points. Gigabyte will sell a 1GHz overclocked card for an estimated $270.
We’ll have full reviews of two retail GTX 560 Ti cards up later today, including comparative benchmarks, but in the meantime, here are the preliminary numbers we pulled from the reference board:
| Nvidia GTX 560 Ti Reference |
|
|---|---|
| 3DMark Vantage | 15,609 |
| Unigine Heaven 2.1 (fps) | 25 |
| Crysis (fps) | 27 |
| BattleForge DX11 (fps) | 54 |
| Far Cry 2/Long (fps) | 96 |
| Metro 2033 (fps) | 16 |
| HAWX DX10 (fps) | 96 |
| STALKER: CoP DX11 (fps) | 44 |
| Just Cause 2 (fps) | 40 |
| Aliens vs. Predator (fps) | 30 |
| Dirt 2 (fps) | 81 |
