Nvidia Corp. this week quietly introduced a new performance-mainstream graphics processing unit (GPU) called GeForce GTX 560. The new graphics board offers lower performance compared to the GeForce GTX 560 Titanium released earlier this year, but is also available at lower price-point and improves speed of its predecessor.

"Starting at $199, the GeForce GTX 560 joins its big brother, the previously launched GTX 560 Ti GPU, in delivering an awesome gaming experience in its price class for games running at 1080p, the world's most popular gaming resolution, according to Valve's Steam Hardware and Software Survey," a statement by Nvidia reads.

Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 graphics card is based on the GF114 graphics processing unit (GPU), an improved version of the GF104 made using 40nm fabrication process with reduced power consumption and improved layout. The model GTX 560 has 336 stream processing units, 56 texture units, 32 render back ends, 7 tessellation engines and well as 256-bit memory controller. Nvidia recommends to clock the GF114 chip of 560 at 810MHz - 950MHz, which means that its stream processors operate at 1620MHz - 1900MHz. The designer recommends partners to install 1GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 4GHz - 4.40GHz onto the GeForce GTX 560 graphics cards.

The novelty fully supports DirectX 11, OpenGL 4, OpenCL 1 as well as all the modern functionality, including hardware decoding of high-definition stereo-3D video and so on. In addition, the novelty supports Nvidia-exclusive features, such as CUDA-exclusive GPGPU software, PhysX and proprietary 3DVision stereo-3D feature.

When clocked at 810MHz/1620MHz, the GeForce GTX 560 delivers 1.08TFLOPS of single-point precision compute performance, whereas when operating at maximum 950MHz/1900MHz, the novelty can process 1.27 trillion of floating point operations per second (TFLOPS) with single-precision. The GeForce GTX 560 is clearly faster than the GeForce GTX 460 (which peak compute performance is 0.9TFLOPS) and the models with maximum clock-speed can compete even against more expensive GeForce GTX 560 Ti.

Given the fact that the vast majority of customers hardly notice the "Ti" moniker of the previously released graphics board, there will likely be a lot of disappointments, when customers find out that the GeForce GTX 560 (in its 810MHz/1.62GHz form) delivers substantially lower performance than the Titanium. Moreover, since Nvidia allows its partners to overclock graphics cards in order to differentiate themselves, it will be generally hard for inexperienced gamers to distinguish between factory-overlocked GeForce GTX 560, which will likely carry advanced and noisy cooling solutions, and stock GeForce GTX 560 Ti. Moreover, despite of similarities in performance, the more expensive Titanium version is larger than the typical GTX 560 and will thus not fit into many small systems.

The GeForce GTX 560 GPU is available starting today from the numerous add-in card partners, including ASL, Asus, Colorful, ECS, EVGA, Gainward, Galaxy, Gigabyte, Innovision 3D, Jetway, Leadtek, MSI, Palit, Point of View, PNY, Sparkle, Zotac and others.

Tags: Nvidia, GF114, Fermi, Geforce