Cancelling out the frequency advantage
NVIDIA's release of the GeForce GTX 560 Ti on January 25 marks the introduction of the 5-series GPU architecture this side of £200. Combing through the specifications of the new card shows that, really, its design is akin to a GeForce GTX 460 on some Balco steroids.
Pumped with higher clocks and a full shader-core count - 384 vs. 336 - along with a few other goodies from the 5-series line, one could be forgiven for thinking that it isn't much more than a clock-bump over the impressive GTX 460 1GB GPU, now available from just £135.
Knowing that the GTX 460 GPU's specifications have been set very conservatively and that most can run at the 822MHz/4,008MHz clocks of the GTX 560 Ti with nothing more than a quick dabble in an overclocking program, we set out to investigate just how a Ti 560-clocked GTX 460 1GB would perform. Doing so provides a good indication of architecture-to-architecture differences and will, we hope, give present GTX 460 owners an informed opinion on whether an upgrade is necessary.
Playing the game safe and opting for a GTX 460 1GB we know can hit the GTX 560 Ti speeds, we put the Gigabyte GTX 460 SOC in the test rig and inched up the clocks a touch.
Same speeds as GTX 560 Ti but, obviously, fewer shaders and lacking some z-culling optimisations and a power-efficient GPU. Full test methodology can be found here.
