Here at the start of 2011, Nvidia is showing no sign of slowing down. In late January, the graphics giant continued the expansion of its 500-series card line with the GeForce GTX 560 Ti, a mid-priced card aimed at bringing high-performance DirectX 11 gaming to cost-conscious, yet serious, gamers. With performance approaching last year’s high-end cards, it offers a significant speedup over the earlier GeForce GTX 460, and it also provides some serious competition for AMD’s recent midrange Radeon HD cards.
The GeForce GTX 560 Ti doesn’t replace the GTX 460 in Nvidia’s lineup, however. Instead, it occupies the $249 price slot the GTX 460 originally shipped at last year, while the GTX 460 will continue to be sold at its current price point of $160 to $199. (Of course, we wouldn’t be surprised if that price point is eventually occupied by an as-yet-unannounced 550 model.)
The GTX 560 gets its performance boost by upping the number of CUDA processing cores to 384 (from 336 in the GTX 460) and by including eight PolyMorph engines, up from seven in the GTX 460. (The CUDA cores are Nvidia's parallel processing units, essentially the parallel computing engine of the card, while the PolyMorph engines are used in geometry processing, turning polygons into game worlds and characters.) The stock clock speed of the graphics-processing unit (GPU) has been upped from 675MHz to 822MHz, and the 1GB of GDDR5 memory runs at 4,008MHz. Additional speedups come from redesign and optimization of the GPU chip.
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