Posted on Wednesday, January 12 2011 @ 21:36 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Wow this sure is a blast from the past! TechPowerUp
analyzed the leaked GeForce 266.44 driver and discovered a reference to the "GeForce GTX 560 Ti". Is this just a mistake or will the GeForce GTX 560 really receive the "Ti" marker from the old GeForce 4 series? Guess we'll have to wait until January 25th to be sure.
About a decade ago when programmable shaders were new, NVIDIA identified its first graphics processors that used them under the GeForce 3 series and 4 series with the "Ti" marker (for example, GeForce 4 Ti 4800), to demarcate them from mainstream "MX" series, which lacked them (eg. GeForce 4 MX 440). Exactly a decade later, there are faint indications that NVIDIA is reintroducing the Ti marker. This was found out on close examination of a leaked 266.44 GeForce driver, which recognized an unreleased NVIDIA GPU as GeForce GTX 560 Ti. This baffles us. To begin with, this doesn't seem like a notebook GPU, second, we don't know of anything big in works at NVIDIA. One plausible explanation we can come up with is that NVIDIA is using "Ti" to simply make its GTX 560 SKU "look" presentable on paper, especially since the SKU may face competition from Radeon HD 6950 1 GB the moment it's released.
