14 DAY TRIAL // Hot on the tracks of the GTX 580 and GTX 570, Nvidia is preparing yet another 500-series graphics cards, the so-called GTX 560 being designed especially to counter AMD's Radeon HD 6950 GPU.
Released no more than a week ago, the HD 6950 managed to find a sweet-spot between the GeForce GTX 470 and GeForce GTX 570/Radeon HD 5970, offering buyers an alternative to these cards for $300.
As a result, the HD 6950 got some pretty positive reviews, benchmarks putting it just 10-15% below the HD 6970 while the card is available for $70 less.
When compared to Nvidia's GPUs, the HD 6950 comes right between the $350 GeForce GTX 570 and the $240 GeForce GTX 470, gaming performance also placing it between these two models.
In order to fill that gap, recent leaks claim that Nvidia is preparing the GTX 560 that is built on top of the GF114 architecture and features 384 CUDA cores, as we previously reported.
However, as we get closer to the graphics card alleged release date, more information seems to surface, an Expreview forum member posting a GPU-Z screenshot that further details this GPU.
According to this source, the GTX 560 will boast 32 ROP units, a 256-bit wide memory interface as well as 1 GB of video buffer, the core clock being run at 820MHz while the GDDR5 chips function at 4000 MHz, pushing the memory bandwidth to 128 GB/s.
As all the other 500-series Nvidia GPUs, this will also be built using TSMC's 40nm manufacturing process, the previous leak suggesting the cards have a TDP of 180W.
The card is expected to launch sometime in January 2011, although we don't know when exactly this is going to happen.
Some leaks suggest January 11 and January 20 as possible release dates. (via TechPowerUp)