Home / NVIDIA / NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448: Performance and Specs

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 in 2025: Nostalgia or a Rational Choice?

Let’s figure out if it’s worth considering a legend from the past for modern tasks.

1. Architecture and Key Features: The Legacy of Fermi

The GTX 560 Ti 448 graphics card, released in 2011, is based on the Fermi architecture (chip GF110) — one of NVIDIA's early strides towards general-purpose computing. The manufacturing process is 40 nm, which seems archaic by 2025 standards (modern GPUs use 4–5 nm).

Unique Features? There are none. Technologies like RTX (ray tracing), DLSS (AI upscaling), or AMD's FidelityFX came much later. This is a purely rasterization GPU, designed for DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4.2.

Key Feature — a cut-down chip from the GTX 570: 448 CUDA cores (instead of 480) and 1280 MB of memory. This was a clever marketing move to compete with AMD, but today such specifications look modest.

2. Memory: GDDR5 and Bandwidth

The GTX 560 Ti 448 is equipped with 1280 MB of GDDR5 on a 320-bit bus. The bandwidth is 128.3 GB/s (for comparison, the budget GTX 1650 from 2020 has 192 GB/s).

Impact on Performance:

- Memory Size is critically low for modern games: even indie projects from 2025 require 2–4 GB.

- A wide bus (320 bits) partially compensates for speed but hits the VRAM limit. In games with high-resolution textures, the card will struggle.

3. Gaming Performance: What Can the Veteran Do?

Average FPS in popular titles (at low settings, 1080p):

- CS2: ~60-80 FPS (minimum requirements).

- Fortnite: ~30-45 FPS (no shadows or post-processing).

- The Witcher 3: ~25-35 FPS (on low, with possible dips).

- Cyberpunk 2077: <20 FPS — practically unplayable.

Resolution Support:

- 1080p — acceptable only for older games (2010–2015).

- 1440p and 4K — unrealistic even for less demanding projects.

Ray Tracing: absent. For comparison, the RTX 3050 (2021) handles hybrid rendering, but the GTX 560 Ti 448 doesn’t even support DirectX 12 Ultimate.

4. Professional Tasks: CUDA on Minimal Terms

CUDA cores (448 in total) theoretically allow using the card for:

- Video Editing: basic tasks in DaVinci Resolve or Premiere Pro, but rendering 4K will take 5–10 times longer than on an RTX 3060.

- 3D Modeling: Blender Cycles on CUDA will work, but a scene with a million polygons will cause lags.

- Scientific Calculations: the outdated Fermi architecture does not support modern libraries like TensorFlow with CUDA 12.

Conclusion: The GTX 560 Ti 448 is only suitable for learning the basics of 3D or working on light projects.

5. Power Consumption and Heat Output: The Fiery Dragon

- TDP: 210 W — similar to modern RTX 4060 Ti’s 160 W, but with drastically lower performance.

- Cooling Recommendations:

- 2–3 case fans for intake and exhaust are mandatory.

- The card’s coolers are noisy: under load, the level reaches 45 dB.

- Cases: Minimum Mid-Tower with good ventilation. Compact builds may face overheating issues.

6. Comparison with Competitors: Past vs Present

Historical Competitors (2011):

- AMD Radeon HD 6950: similar performance, but with 2 GB of memory — an advantage in the long run.

Modern Analogues (2025):

- NVIDIA GTX 1650 (4 GB GDDR6): 2–3 times faster, TDP of 75 W, with new models priced at $150–170.

- AMD RX 6400 (4 GB GDDR6): similar level, support for PCIe 4.0, priced at $130–150.

Conclusion: The GTX 560 Ti 448 loses even to budget newcomers from 2025.

7. Practical Tips: If You Decide to Buy

- Power Supply: At least 500 W with an 80+ Bronze certification. Peak loads may cause shutdowns.

- Compatibility:

- PCIe 2.0 x16 — works in 3.0/4.0 slots, but will bottle-neck with modern CPUs.

- Drivers: official support has ended. The latest version is 472.12 (2021).

- Operating Systems: Windows 10 (with limitations), Linux with open-source Nouveau drivers.

8. Pros and Cons

Pros:

- Low price on the secondary market ($20–40).

- Sufficient for retro games (Skyrim, GTA V on medium).

- Easy replacement of thermal paste prolongs lifespan.

Cons:

- No support for new APIs (DirectX 12 Ultimate, Vulkan 1.3).

- High power consumption.

- Limited memory and lack of technologies like DLSS.

9. Final Conclusion: Who Is GTX 560 Ti 448 Suitable For?

This graphics card is an artifact of its era, worth considering only in two cases:

1. Budget build for old games: If you are nostalgic for CS:GO or Mass Effect.

2. Experiments and upgrades for old PCs: A temporary solution until you save up for an RTX 3050 or RX 6600.

Why Not to Buy It in 2025:

- Even $150 is enough for a used GTX 1060 6 GB, which is twice as powerful and more energy-efficient.

- The lack of support for new technologies makes the card unpromising.

Conclusion: The GTX 560 Ti 448 is a symbol of its time but falls behind even the most modest modern GPUs in 2025. Its place is among enthusiasts, collectors, and those who need to "tide over" until they can purchase something relevant. For comfortable gaming or work, it’s better to choose something from the current generation.

Basic

Label Name

NVIDIA

Platform

Desktop

Launch Date

November 2011

Model Name

GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448

Generation

GeForce 500

Bus Interface

PCIe 2.0 x16

Transistors

3,000 million

TMUs

Texture Mapping Units (TMUs) serve as components of the GPU, which are capable of rotating, scaling, and distorting binary images, and then placing them as textures onto any plane of a given 3D model. This process is called texture mapping.

Foundry

TSMC

Process Size

40 nm

Architecture

Fermi 2.0

Memory Specifications

Memory Size

1280MB

Memory Type

GDDR5

Memory Bus

The memory bus width refers to the number of bits of data that the video memory can transfer within a single clock cycle. The larger the bus width, the greater the amount of data that can be transmitted instantaneously, making it one of the crucial parameters of video memory. The memory bandwidth is calculated as: Memory Bandwidth = Memory Frequency x Memory Bus Width / 8. Therefore, when the memory frequencies are similar, the memory bus width will determine the size of the memory bandwidth.

320bit

Memory Clock

950MHz

Bandwidth

Memory bandwidth refers to the data transfer rate between the graphics chip and the video memory. It is measured in bytes per second, and the formula to calculate it is: memory bandwidth = working frequency × memory bus width / 8 bits.

152.0 GB/s

Theoretical Performance

Pixel Rate

Pixel fill rate refers to the number of pixels a graphics processing unit (GPU) can render per second, measured in MPixels/s (million pixels per second) or GPixels/s (billion pixels per second). It is the most commonly used metric to evaluate the pixel processing performance of a graphics card.

20.50 GPixel/s

Texture Rate

Texture fill rate refers to the number of texture map elements (texels) that a GPU can map to pixels in a single second.

40.99 GTexel/s

FP64 (double)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy, while single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

164.0 GFLOPS

FP32 (float)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks, while double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

1.286 TFLOPS

Miscellaneous

SM Count

Multiple Streaming Processors (SPs), along with other resources, form a Streaming Multiprocessor (SM), which is also referred to as a GPU's major core. These additional resources include components such as warp schedulers, registers, and shared memory. The SM can be considered the heart of the GPU, similar to a CPU core, with registers and shared memory being scarce resources within the SM.

Shading Units

The most fundamental processing unit is the Streaming Processor (SP), where specific instructions and tasks are executed. GPUs perform parallel computing, which means multiple SPs work simultaneously to process tasks.

448

L1 Cache

64 KB (per SM)

L2 Cache

640KB

TDP

210W

Vulkan Version

Vulkan is a cross-platform graphics and compute API by Khronos Group, offering high performance and low CPU overhead. It lets developers control the GPU directly, reduces rendering overhead, and supports multi-threading and multi-core processors.

N/A

OpenCL Version

1.1

OpenGL

4.6

DirectX

12 (11_0)

CUDA

2.0

Power Connectors

2x 6-pin

Shader Model

5.1

ROPs

The Raster Operations Pipeline (ROPs) is primarily responsible for handling lighting and reflection calculations in games, as well as managing effects like anti-aliasing (AA), high resolution, smoke, and fire. The more demanding the anti-aliasing and lighting effects in a game, the higher the performance requirements for the ROPs; otherwise, it may result in a sharp drop in frame rate.

Suggested PSU

550W

Benchmarks

FP32 (float)

Score

1.286 TFLOPS

Compared to Other GPU

FP32 (float) / TFLOPS

Quadro P620

1.358 +5.6%

GeForce GTX 560 Ti X2

1.332 +3.6%

GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448

1.286

Radeon 630 Mobile

1.265 -1.6%

GeForce GTX 560 Ti

1.238 -3.7%