NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti Video Card Review

Replacing the GeForce GTX 470 is NVIDIA's Fermi GF114-based GeForce GTX 560 Titanium, a tuned variant of GF104.

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.

NVIDIA targets the GeForce GTX 560 Ti at upper-segment mainstream users willing to spend $250 on their discrete graphics. We use the most demanding PC video game titles and benchmark software available, graphical frame rate performance is tested against a large collection of competing desktop products. Using the DirectX-9 API that is native to Windows XP, we've compared products with Mafia II. Some older DirectX-10 favorites such as Crysis Warhead and PCMark Vantage are included, as well as newer DirectX-11 titles such as: Aliens vs Predator, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, BattleForge, Lost Planet 2, Metro 2033, Tom Clancy's HAWX2, and the Unigine Heaven 2.1 benchmark. Built to deliver the best possible graphical experience at its price point, NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 560 Ti video card delivers top-end frame rates with outstanding efficiency. We've even tested the GeForce GTX 560 Ti to confirm if it will play Call of Duty: Black Ops with every quality setting configured to maximum levels.

Good things come to those who patiently wait, and the GeForce GTX 560 Titanium proves this. There's no easy way to compare the current SM assignment to past Fermi architectures because the formula changes between generations. Anyone who tries to claim that GF114 is a fully SM-equipped version of the GF104 has lost touch with the very essence of Fermi, in that it's configuration is modular. So then it is also unfair to compare the original GF100 generation of Fermi architecture to another like the GeForce GF110 series; especially since the ratio of shaders and texture units per SM has changed to favor modern video games more than it crunches CUDA calculations. As a direct result, GeForce GTX 560 Ti (and all other GF11x GPUs) outperform their predecessors clock for clock and watt for watt in PC video games.

Manufacturer: NVIDIA Corporation
Product Name: GeForce GTX 560 Ti (Titanium)
Suggested Retail Price: $249.99 MSRP

Full Disclosure: The product sample used in this article has been provided by NVIDIA.

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