NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti Review - PAGE 1

When NVIDIA quietly released their 500 series graphics cards, everyone was taken aback (inducing AMD) by just how well the Fermi architecture had been refined over the previous generation. The GTX 580 was the first such product to ship and in testing across the board it was found to have better performance, power efficiency and acoustics than the GTX 480 it replaced. This allowed the 500 series to quickly adopt taglines such as “Fermi done right” or “the Fermi we’ve been waiting for”. Since then, NVIDIA has released one other product in the series, the GTX 570. This card continued the along the same lines as the GTX 580 but even with the reduced pricing, the 500 series was still only accessible to the high-end market.

We are now at the third launch of the refined Fermi architecture and this time around it's the mainstream market's turn to get their 500 series product – the GTX 560 Ti. The GeForce GTX 560 Ti continues the tradition of graphics cards such as the 8800GT and GTX 460, where NVIDIA releases a product with exceptional gaming performance at a mainstream price.

The GTX 560 Ti, like the two other cards in the series, has been optimized down to the transistor level to offer better efficiency than its 400 series counterpart, and according to NVIDIA we should be seeing a performance-per-watt increase of 21% over the GTX 460. The GTX 560 Ti also comes with a reference clock of 822/1644MHz and includes 8 streaming multiprocessors , which gives it a total of 384 CUDA cores. This should place the Ti well above the GTX 460 in terms of overall performance and with a price of $249.99, it could be the card to beat in 2011. The competition for the GTX 560 Ti is going to be fierce however, as AMD has just released their 1GB version of the HD 6950, which comes with an MSRP of $259.99.

Another interesting aspect of the GTX 560 is the re-emergence of the "Ti" (for titanium) naming scheme. According to NVIDA the name was chosen because titanium is a very lightweight material, yet strong as steel. This embodies the GTX 560 Ti, as it offers incredible performance in a small package.