14 DAY TRIAL // In a little more than a week from now, on May 17 to be more precise, Nvidia will announce the introduction of a new non-Ti GTX 560 graphics card that was designed to replace the venerable GTX 460 1GB in its product range.
Nvidia calls its latest creation "the perfect upgrade for gaming at 1080p," and the non-Ti GTX 560 is expected to battle it out in the mainstream graphics market with AMD's Radeon HD 6870.
Specs wise, the card looks surprisingly similar to the 1GB version of the GTX 460, as it features the same number of stream processors (336) as well as 56 texture units and 32 ROP units.
However, the GPU is derived from the GF114 core that is used for the GTX 560 Ti, which means that it features a slightly tweaked architecture with a lower power consumption.
This change not only allowed Nvidia to lower the TDP of the card by 10W (160W for the GTX 460 1GB vs 150W for the GTX 560), but it also enabled it to raise the operating frequency of the core to 820MHz.
To make the GTX 560 even faster, the core is now paired with 1002MHz (4008MHz data rate) GDDR5 memory chips and the card can pack as much as 2GB of video buffer if manufacturers decide that 1GB is not enough.
The memory linked to the core via the same 256-bit wide bus as that of its predecessor, but the improved clock speeds should have a detrimental effect on the bandwidth available to the GF114 core.
No official details regarding pricing are available at this time, but Sweclockers' report claims that the GTX 560 should be priced at 1600 SKE which, excluding VAT, translates to about $205 US.
The GTX 460 1GB is selling in Sweden for 1400 SKE ($179 USD excluding VAT).