Today we put under benchmark two graphics cards made by AMD and Nvidia: The GeForce 560 Ti 2GB and the Radeon HD 6790 1GB. The cards are not directly comparable in terms of price and performance. The GeForce GTX 560 Ti retails for $250 and it is placed in direct competition with the Radeon HD 6870. On the other hand, the Radeon HD 6790 1GB has been released at crowded $150 price segment and it has been released as a response to Nvidia's GTX 550 offering, although it is still competing with NVIDIA’s GTX 460 lineup.

With all those graphics cards available today out there, the following table may be enlightening:

*By the time this review was published Nvidia had not yet officially announced the GeForce GTX 560. As a result we have not included performance figures of this new card in this article.

About the NVIDIA GTX 560 Ti

The NVIDIA GTX 560 Ti is an addition of the Company's "Fermi" line of consumer GPUs that were designed to deliver DirectX 11 (DX11) performance for PC gaming platforms.

The GeForce 560 Ti GPU is based on a revised version of the GF104 chip, named GF114. The GTX 560 Ti takes advantage of every functional unit of the GF114 chip. It's core clock is set to 822MHz, a 1002MHz (4008MHz data rate) memory clock, it has 384 CUDA Cores, 64 texture units, 8 Polymorph Engines, 32 ROPs, 512KB L2 cache and 4x64bit memory controllers.

Load TDP is going up by 10W, from 160W on the GTX 460 1GB to 170W on the GTX 560 Ti.

NVIDIA’s marketing focus for the GTX 560 is to pair it with Intel’s recently launched Sandy Bridge CPUs, which have inspired a wave of computer upgrades that NVIDIA would like to hitch a ride with.

The card also fully supports NVIDIA 3D Vision NVIDIA Surround and NVIDIA SLI technologies.

We have in our hands Gainward's implementation of the GeForce GTX560 Ti, the "Gainward GTX 560 Ti 2048MB Phantom," which comes with an extra 1GB of memory onboard compared to Nvidia's reference design. More information about the card is available in the following pages.

About the AMD Radeon HD 6790 1GB

AMD launched the Radeon HD 6790 in order to compete with the GeForce GTX 550 Ti. The card is based on the same 40nm Barts GPU that powers the Radeon HD 6800 series.

The Radeon HD 6790 is further cut-down from the 6850, losing 2 SIMD units and half of its ROPs; mitigating this some are higher clockspeeds for both the core and the memory. The card features 800 SPs and 16 ROPs operating at 840MHz, it has a 256bit bus and a 1050MHz (4.2GHz data rate) memory clock.

The card has a 150W TDP, which is almost identical to the 151W TDP of the 6870.

Other features include:

- Second generation Microsoft DirectX 11 support
- PCI Express 2.1 x16 bus interface
- "Eye-Definition" graphics
- AMD Eyefinity multi-display technology
- AMD EyeSpeed visual acceleration
- UVD 3 dedicated video playback accelerator
- AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing technology
- DirectCompute 11
- OpenCL Support
- AMD HD3D technology
- Blu-ray 3D support - AMD CrossfireX multi-GPU technology
- Integrated HDMI 1.4a with support for stereoscopic 3D
- Integrated HD audio controller
- AMD PowerPlay power management technology

The second card we will put under test today is the Club3D HD6790 CoolStream edition, which is presented in detail later on.