Mar 30, 2011 20:31 GMT  ·  By

Nvidia seems to be really eager to extend its 500-series of graphics cards as some leaks that have reached the Web suggest that the company is planning to develop a new GTX 560 graphics card that will drop the Ti moniker used by its older brother and the will feature a lower performance level.

According to the information that is available until now, the graphics card is actually a higher clocked version of the GTX 460 1GB as it features 336 shader ALUs, 56 texturing units, 32 ROP units as well as a 256-bit memory interface.

This will be connected to 1GB of GGDR5 video buffer that will work at a yet unknown speed.

The operating frequency of the GPU is also an unknown, but Heise suggests that this should be clocked higher than 800MHz.

To put things in perspective, the standard GTX 460 Ti runs at 675MHz, so the speed bump should offer quite a noticeable improvement in performance which should make it behave similarly with AMD's Radeon HD 6870.

In Nvidia's range, this would fall right between the GTX 560 Ti and the GTX 460 1GB and should cover the price gap that exists right now between Nvidia's mainstream solutions, as rumors suggest its MSRP will fall in the 170 to 180 Euros range.

Other details are not available at this time, but Heise suggests the GTX 560 should launch sometime between mid-April and early May.

One of the most important pieces of information missing at this time is the name of the core that the GTX 560 is based on, as this could either be a regular GF104 or a cut down version of the GF114 core.

Since this year has started, Nvidia has launched no less than three 500-series desktop graphics card, and these range right now between $150 and $699 in price.