NVIDIA GTX 560 Ti Launch Review

NVIDIA first announced the GeForce GTX 480 in 2009 but didn’t release it till early last year. Late last year NVIDIA launched the GeForce GTX 460 as a mid-range card. They have taken to describing the GTX 460 as a Hunter class unit in the RTS space with firepower and dizzying speed to devastate his enemy. NVIDIA’s board partners took the GTX 460 to clock speeds above 800MHz, giving performance above that of the HD 5870 in some DirectX 11 games.

If you remember, the GTX 460 had 336 CUDA cores out of a possible 384 cores on the chip. NVIDIA’s first generation of GF100 chips had at least one set of cores disabled. Speculation last year was that NVIDIA would launch a fully enabled GF104 chip (the chip used on the GTX 460) with all 384 cores enabled. That is the focus on today’s launch of the first 2011 video card from NVIDIA, the GeForce GTX 560 TI. For those knowing a little about NVIDIA’s history, they launched the GeForce2 Ti way back in 2001 along with the GeForce2 Pro. Later they released the GeForce3 Ti500 and GeForce3 Ti200 as the refresh of the GeForce3 and the GeForce 4 Ti 4600/4400/4200 as the next iteration of their cards. Today the Titanium branding is reborn in the new GeForce GTX 560 Ti as a replacement for the GeForce GTX 460 and 470 in their lineups.