February 1st, 2011
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti Review @ BenchmarkReviews
It’s been nearly a decade since NVIDIA last used the Titanium moniker on one of their product, and for those who can still recall how the GeForce 4 series was revision of the previous series the new GeForce GTX 560 Ti will make perfect sense. Replacing the GeForce GTX 470 video card in the current product stack, NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 560 Ti uses a tuned GF114 GPU that finally delivers a full GF104 Fermi architecture.
The original GF104 GPU offered seven of eight possible Streaming Multiprocessors (SM) with the GeForce GTX 460 video card, and now NVIDIA returns to enable that last SM to make even more cores available to GF114, now 384 compared to 336. Keeping with tradition, the GeForce GTX 560 Ti uses an identical SM configuration as the GeForce GTX 460. Each SM still offers 48 CUDA cores, four dispatch units, and eight texture/special function units. Besides including the eighth and final SM on the GPU, what’s different is the myriad of transistor-level changes to improve power efficiency and in turn allowed for significantly faster clock speeds. In this article, Benchmark Reviews tests the GeForce GTX 560 Ti against an entire market of graphics card options.
Fierce competition between NVIDIA and AMD have allowed PC gamers to enjoy the best graphics hardware ever developed for desktop computers. NVIDIA continues to update their product family, and now offers the GeForce GTX 560 to join ranks with the GTX 570 and 580 video cards. The GeForce GTX 560 Ti is intended to wow gamers in much the same way that their GeForce GTX 460 series did, but at a much higher level of performance. Packed with all eight SMs, the GF114 GPU is clocked to 822/1644 MHz on base models, with a 1001 MHz 1GB GDDR5 onboard video frame buffer riding the traditional 256-bit memory bus. Some of NVIDIA’s add-in card (AIC) partners have received specially picked GPUs capable of achieving 1000MHz. The GeForce GTX 560 Ti sample we’ve received shares some of the same headroom, and was able to overclock with only a very small voltage bump. All of this adds up to more potential performance for gamers, and some serious enthusiast credibility for overclockers.
