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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti OEM

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti OEM in 2025: A Retro Card for Enthusiasts and Budget Systems

Overview of Architecture, Performance, and Practical Value in the Modern Context

Introduction

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti OEM is a graphics card released in 2011, still generating interest among retro hardware enthusiasts and owners of old PCs. Despite lacking support for modern technologies, it remains a symbol of the era when the Fermi architecture set the tone for the gaming market. In 2025, this model is more of an artifact than a working tool, yet it can still be found in budget builds. Let's explore who might find it useful today and why.

1. Architecture and Key Features

Fermi: A Legacy of the 2010s

The GTX 560 Ti OEM is built on the Fermi architecture (GF114), manufactured using a 40nm process. Unlike modern architectures like Ampere or Ada Lovelace, Fermi focused on increasing the number of CUDA cores (384 in the GTX 560 Ti) and improving tessellation. However, there is no hint of ray tracing (RTX), DLSS, or FidelityFX—these technologies emerged 7-10 years later.

Unique Features for Its Time:

- Support for DirectX 11 and Shader Model 5.0;

- NVIDIA PhysX technology for physical calculations in games;

- 3D Vision Ready for stereoscopic 3D (popular in the early 2010s).

2. Memory: Modest Specs Compared to Modern Standards

- Memory Type: GDDR5 (not GDDR6X or HBM);

- Size: 1 GB (less commonly, 2 GB in modified OEM versions);

- Bus Width: 256-bit;

- Bandwidth: 128 GB/s.

For games in 2025, 1 GB of video memory is catastrophically low: even indie projects like Hades II require a minimum of 2 GB. However, for older titles (Skyrim, GTA IV, Mass Effect 3), this amount is sufficient for medium settings at 1080p.

3. Gaming Performance: Nostalgia for the HD Era

Example FPS (1080p, medium settings):

- The Witcher 2: 35–40 FPS;

- Battlefield 3: 40–45 FPS;

- CS:GO: 90–110 FPS;

- Fortnite (Performance mode): 30–35 FPS.

Modern Games:

Even Minecraft with SEUS Renewed shaders will lag, and titles like Cyberpunk 2077 or Starfield won’t run at all. 4K and 1440p are unavailable—900p is the maximum for less demanding games.

Ray Tracing: Absent. For RTX effects, external software like Reshade is required, but this will reduce the FPS to 10–15 frames.

4. Professional Tasks: Minimal Suitability

- Video Editing: In Adobe Premiere Pro (via Mercury Playback Engine), the card can handle HD video rendering, but 4K materials will cause lag.

- 3D Modeling: Blender or AutoCAD will run, but CUDA rendering will take 5–7 times longer than on an RTX 4060.

- Scientific Computations: CUDA and OpenCL support is present, but 384 Fermi cores cannot compete with the thousands of cores available in modern GPUs.

Conclusion: The GTX 560 Ti OEM is suitable only for learning or handling simple projects.

5. Power Consumption and Heat Generation

- TDP: 170 W;

- Recommended PSU: 450 W (with a margin for older electronics);

- Temperatures: Up to 85°C under load (reference cooler).

Cooling Tips:

- Use a case with good ventilation (2–3 fans);

- Replace thermal paste if the card is used;

- Avoid compact cases—GPUs need space for airflow.

6. Comparison with Competitors

2011-2012 Analogues:

- AMD Radeon HD 6950: 2 GB GDDR5, 1408 stream processors. Slightly faster in games than the GTX 560 Ti but generates more heat (TDP 200 W).

- NVIDIA GTX 580: 512 CUDA cores, 1.5 GB memory. About 30% more powerful, but more expensive and power-hungry (244 W TDP).

In 2025: Even the budget NVIDIA GTX 1650 (4 GB GDDR6, TDP 75 W) outperforms the GTX 560 Ti OEM by 3–4 times in performance.

7. Practical Tips

- Power Supply: 450–500 W with an 80+ Bronze certification. Example: Corsair CX450 (price: $55–65);

- Compatibility: PCIe 2.0 x16 works in PCIe 3.0/4.0 slots, but check the card's length (9 inches) and the presence of a 6-pin connector;

- Drivers: Official support has ended. Use modified drivers (e.g., from the NVCleanstall community) for Windows 10/11;

- OS: Best on Windows 7/8.1—fewer conflicts with outdated software.

8. Pros and Cons

Pros:

- Low price on the used market ($20–40);

- Compatibility with retro games and old OSs;

- Simple overclocking (boosting core frequency up to 950 MHz).

Cons:

- No support for DirectX 12 Ultimate;

- Limited video memory;

- High power consumption for its class;

- No warranty (only used).

9. Final Conclusion: Who is the GTX 560 Ti OEM Suitable For?

This graphics card is a choice for:

1. Retro PC enthusiasts building systems from the 2010s;

2. Owners of old computers needing to revive their machines for basic tasks (office, browsing, HD video);

3. Budget gamers willing to play older titles on low settings.

Alternatives for 2025: If your budget is $100–150, consider new GPUs like the Intel Arc A380 (6 GB GDDR6, XeSS support) or AMD Radeon RX 6400 (4 GB GDDR6). They are far more efficient and support modern APIs.

The GTX 560 Ti OEM is not a workhorse but rather a monument to an era, reminding us how far the industry has progressed in 15 years. It should only be purchased for nostalgia or as an exhibit in a hardware enthusiast's collection.

Basic

Label Name

NVIDIA

Platform

Desktop

Launch Date

March 2011

Model Name

GeForce GTX 560 Ti OEM

Generation

GeForce 500

Bus Interface

PCIe 2.0 x16

Transistors

1,950 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

1024MB

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.

256bit

Memory Clock

1002MHz

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.

128.3 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.

13.17 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.

52.67 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.

105.3 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.

1.238 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.

384

L1 Cache

64 KB (per SM)

L2 Cache

512KB

TDP

170W

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

2.1

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

450W

Benchmarks

FP32 (float)

Score

1.238 TFLOPS

Compared to Other GPU

FP32 (float) / TFLOPS

FirePro M8900

1.28 +3.4%

Radeon RX 540X Mobile

1.265 +2.2%

GeForce GTX 560 Ti OEM

1.238

Radeon E9174 MXM

1.223 -1.2%

Radeon R7 250X

1.192 -3.7%