14 DAY TRIAL // The first reports about Nvidia's plans to release a non-Ti version of the GeForce GTX 560 made their appearance a little more than a month ago and now the Santa Clara company has come to confirm this rumors as well as the May 17 release date that has been circulating across the Web.
The news was made official by Nvidia's GeForce website in a sneak peak of the card which reads: “This story is a sneak peek of the GeForce GTX 560 running three upcoming games. [Duke Nukem Forever, Alice Madness Returns and Dungeon Seige III]
“Check back to GeForce.com on Tuesday May 17th at 6:00 a.m. PDT when the card releases for complete product details and specific pricing information.”
According to the Nvidia article, the GTX 560 was developed in order to allow users to play modern games at 1920x1080, which has become the most popular resolution on Steam.
As a result, the non-TI GTX 560 is situated between the GeForce GTX 460 and GeForce GTX 560 Ti in terms of price and performance and it actually comes as a higher clocked version of the GTX 460 1GB.
Compared with its predecessor, which had its operating frequencies set at 675MHz for the core and 900MHz (3.6GHz data rate) for the memory, the GTX 560 comes as a huge improvement as its GPU and video buffer are now run at 820MHz core and 1002MHz (4008MHz data rate), respectively.
In addition to the improved clocks, the power consumption of the GTX 560 has been lowered by 10W since it now has a TDP of 150W.
However, the core specifications have remained unchanged from the GTX 460 1GB and the graphics card packs the same 336 stream processors, 56 texture units, 32 ROP units and a 256-bit wide memory bus that can be connected to either 1GB or 2GB of GDDR5 video buffer.
According to some previous reports, the GTX 560 is expected to cost somewhere in the vicinity of $200 US.