After much rumor, Nvidia finally launched their GTX 560 Ti, the successor of the GTX 460. Well, being a successor is much of a misleading way to say of the GTX 560 Ti. It’s not a successor at all as both are using the same architecture. To be bland, the GTX 560 Ti is the GTX 460, just fully unleashed and fine-tuned. It seemed weird thought that Nvidia revived the “Ti” suffix after absence of eight years.

The GTX 560 Ti uses the GF114 design, which is the ‘refined’ version of the GF104 used by GTX 460. With the GTX 460 we saw NVIDIA disable some functional units and limit the clockspeed, but for GTX 560 Ti they’re going all out. Every functional unit is enabled, and clockspeed are much higher, with a core clock of 822MHz being what we believe is much closer to the original design specifications of GF104. Even though GF114 is identical to GF104 in architecture and the numbers of functional units, as we’re going to see the resulting video cards are quite different – GTX 560 Ti is quite a bit faster than GTX 460 most of the time.

The GTX 460 1GB had all 32 of its ROPs and related hardware enabled, but only 7 of its 8 SMs enabled, leaving its geometry/shading/texturing power slightly crippled from what the GF104 chip was fully capable of. Like GF110/GTX 580, GF114/GTX 560 Ti will be a fully enabled part: all 384 CUDA Cores, 64 texture units, 8 Polymorph Engines, 32 ROPs, 512KB L2 cache, 4x64bit memory controllers are present, accounted for, and functional. Thus compared to GTX 460 1GB in particular, GTX 560 Ti immediately has more shading, texturing, and geometry performance than its predecessor, with roughly a 14% advantage over a similarly clocked GTX 460 1GB.

Of course, by enabling all the muscles, the TDP of the GTX 560 has risen by 10W compared to the GTX 460, from 160W to 170W. GF114 is pin compatible with GF104, so partners can drop it in to existing GTX 460 designs, but those designs will need to be able to handle the extra power draw and heat. NVIDIA’s own reference design has been bulked up some, just like how the cooling block of GTX 580 different from GTX 480.

The GTX 560 Ti will be priced at around $249, around $20 more than the GTX 460. Officially, the GTX 460 will be moved down a segment, as it can be had for as low as $150 if you try to scout around.

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