EVGA GeForce GTX560Ti FTW 448-Cores Review

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

This holiday season is gearing up to be a big one for computer gamers. A lot of big titles have been or will soon be released. Battlefield 3, Batman: Arkham City, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Modern Warfare 3, and Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim are a few. Diablo 3 is expected early in 2012 as well. While this is great news for gamers, we don't have any expected releases of new GPU platforms. That's not terribly disheartening, as the current top-of-the-line GPUs will play even the most demanding of these titles. The problem is, those top end GPUs also cost an arm and a leg. NVIDIA is setting out to combat this problem for the holiday season 2011 by releasing a new and improved version of the GTX 560 Ti, the GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores. In this article, Benchmark Reviews is bringing you details on the EVGA GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores FTW.

When the GTX 560 Ti Video Card was released in January 2011, it improved upon the existing architecture of the GF104 GPU. The GTX 460 was the first video card that sported the GF104, but it only used 7 Streaming Multiprocessors and sported only 336 CUDA Cores. Still, in its day, the GTX 460 was quite formidable. When the GTX 560 Ti came out, it used the GF114 GPU, identical to the GF104 but with the full 8 streaming processors enabled and an upped CUDA Core count of 384. The GTX 560 Ti boosted graphics performance significantly, beating out the AMD HD 6870 and coming extremely close to the performance of the Radeon HD 5870, even edging it out in some benchmarks. With no new architecture arriving for the 2011 Holiday Season, NVIDIA is revamping the GTX 560 Ti by boosting the number of CUDA Cores.

In the current NVIDIA GPU structure, the GTX 560 Ti takes the place of the GTX 470 and fits nicely between the GTX 460 and GTX 570. That being said, there is still quite a gap between the GTX 560 Ti and the GTX 570. Bumping up the CUDA Cores to 448 as opposed to 384 should improve performance to the point where the GTX 560 Ti 448 sits in that gap. In fact, a lot of the specifications of the GTX 560 Ti start to look a little more like the GTX 570. The Streaming Multiprocessor count, of course, remains the same at 8 since the GTX 560 Ti 448 is still built off the GF114 GPU. As I mentioned before, the CUDA Core count is increased on the GTX 560 Ti 448 from 384 to, obviously, 448. This number matches the number of CUDA Cores found on the GTX 470. The GTX 470, however, has 14 Streaming Multiprocessors from which the Cores come, for 32 Cores per SM.

With only 8 Streaming Multiprocessors, the GTX 560 Ti 448 touts 56 Cores per SM. Video RAM size is increased on the GTX 560 Ti 448 as well, up to 1280MB from 1024MB. With the increase in memory and CUDA Core amounts, however, comes a decrease in clock speed that now matches the GTX 570. The Graphics clock speed on the GTX 560 Ti 448 is 732MHz and the Processor clock speed is double that at 1464MHz. This is down a little from the 822/1644MHz speeds on the original GTX 560 Ti. The Memory clock on the GTX 560 Ti 448 is knocked down to a 950MHz clock rate and 3800MHz data rate from the 1001/4008MHz speeds on the original GTX 560 Ti.

With the current specifications of the GTX 560 Ti 448 sitting right between the GTX 560 Ti and the GTX 570, it only makes sense that the price would as well. The GTX 560 Ti 448 is set to be released with an MSRP of $289. GTX 560 Ti Video Cards are averaging around $249 right now and GTX 570 cards are around $329. This puts the GTX 560 Ti 448 right in the middle. The real question is, will its performance occupy that same slot? Let's move along and take a closer look at the GTX 560 Ti 448.

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