Ever since the first Fermi-based graphics card appeared at the end of March, it was clear that something just doesn’t smell alright about it. The first cards from the GeForce GTX 400 series were obviously engineered under great pressure. The result was chips that were fast, but the price, consumption, heating and yield percentage of which was far from commendable, as much as NVIDIA tried to convince us otherwise.

Yet everyone has the right to a second chance, so NVIDIA figured that the correct perspective isn’t in weakening the way too expensive GF100 chip and its installation onto weaker card revisions (as confirmed by GeForce GTX 465, the review of which we’ve recently published), instead going for developing a weaker, but more economical version of the chip, something that the upper intermediate class cards could be based on.
This has given birth to GF104. This is a chip manufactured in the same 40-nm production process, but containing a bit under two billion transistors, unlike the three billion contained by the monstrous GF100. Instead of 512 CUDA cores on GF100, 480 of which were active on GTX 480, then 448 on GTX 470 and 352 on GTX 465, the new GF104 chip has 384 cores, 336 of which are active on GTX 460. According to some sources, GF104 will also be used on GTX 475 with all cores active, as well as the dual-GPU GeForce GTX 495, expected by the end of the summer.

The interesting thing about the new GeForce GTX 460 is that it comes in two variants. The basic difference between these is the width of the memory bus and the quantity of memory present, so we have a version with a 192-bit bus and 768 MB GDDR5 memory, as well as a version with a 256-bit bus and an entire 1 GB video RAM. The ROP unit number is also different – 24 on the weaker and 32 on the stronger model, which could impact performance in antialiasing mode, albeit not as much as on Radeon HD 5830, for example, which had its ROP unit number halved compared to its stronger brethren.

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• READ MORE (Source): InsideHW – ASUS GeForce GTX 460 TOP: Finally a Proper Fermi!