14 DAY TRIAL // About a decade or so ago, Nvidia came up with the Ti moniker in order to differentiate their performance-orientated graphics cards from the rest of the company's lineup, and, now, it seems like the Santa Clara giant is going to revive this marker and use it on their upcoming GTX 560 GPU.
The Ti moniker was introduced by Nvidia just at the beginning of the millennium with the launch of the GeForce 2 Ti graphics card that was meant to offer a mid-range alternative to the high-end GeForce 3 line.
It was then used for the GeForce 3 Ti200 and the GeForce 3 Ti500 GPUs as well as for the entire GeForce 4 lineup.
Starting with the GeForce FX series, the Ti moniker was discontinued.
However, it seems like it is now set to make a comeback, as TechPowerUp reports that a reference to a video card called the GeForce GTX 560 Ti has been found in the leaked Nvidia 266.44 driver.
Looking at the driver, it doesn't seem like this is a notebook GPU, so it’s highly probable the GPU is destined for the retail market.
No other details about the GTX 560 are available at this time, but past leaks suggest the GPU is based on the GF114 core, features 384 CUDA processors, a 256-bit GDDR5 memory interface, and core clock speeds of 820 MHz.
As all the other 500-series Nvidia GPUs, the GTX 560 is built using TSMC's 40nm manufacturing process, comes with 32 ROP units and 1 GB of video buffer which is clocked at 4000 MHz, pushing the memory bandwidth to 128 GB/s.
The GTX 560 is meant to take on the Radeon HD 6850 and will be officially released on January 25th for about $279.99.
What remains to be seen, however, is if the GTX 560 manages to revive the glory days of the GeForce 4200 Ti making it worthy of this name.