Nvidia's recent introduction of a new product—the GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448—was a happy occasion on several counts.
This newcomer slots in between two very well established offerings, the GeForce GTX 560 Ti and the GeForce GTX 570. One artifact of this product's late addition to the Nvidia lineup is its awkward name, which is meant to signify its place in the world using an especially long accumulation of letters and numbers. In fact, the "448" in the name refers to the number of shader ALUs enabled on the card's GF110 GPU.
Only 14 of its SMs are enabled, but in every other way—clock speeds, the number of memory interfaces and ROP partitions, the works—the GTX 560 Ti 448 is similar to the GTX 570. The consequences of this change are so minor as to be nearly imperceptible. The loss of an additional SM means the GTX 560 Ti 448 will have a little less shader arithmetic throughput, texture filtering capacity, and geometry processing ability than the 570.
However, the Ti 560 448 has the exact same memory bandwidth, pixel fill rate, and triangle rasterization rate. Combine that with the fact that the Zotac card we're reviewing is clocked higher than Nvidia's baseline speed, at 765MHz rather than 732MHz, and the GTX 560 Ti 448 becomes vanishingly close to the GTX 570 in terms of key graphics throughput rates.
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