NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560M

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560M is a high-end laptop graphics card that was announced at Computex 2011. It is based on the new GF116 core as part of the Fermi architecture. Therefore, it supports DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4.0. Compared to its predecessor, the GeForce GTX 460M, the 560M offers higher clock speeds without a large increase in power demand.

The GF116 core is essentially an optimized GF106 core with the same features. The chip offers 192 shaders and a 192 Bit memory bus for GDDR5. More details on the GF106 architecture can be found in the GeForce GTX 460M article.

The performance of the GeForce GTX 560M is compareable to the older GeForce GTX 480M. In our tests (see benchmarks below), the GTX 560M was on average 13% faster than the old GTX 460M. As a result, only very demanding games (e.g., Crysis 1, Crysis 2, Dirt 3 and Metro 2033) are not fluently playable at highest settings and Full HD resolution with Anti Aliasing. Most other current and older games can be played with maxed out settings as of 2011. See at the end of this page for detailled gaming benchmarks of many current games.

As the GeForce GTX 460M, the 560M supports Bitstream HD Audio (Blu-Ray) output via HDMI. Similar to the Radeon HD 5850, the GTX 460M can transfer Dolby True HD and DTS-HD bitstream-wise without quality loss to a HiFi receiver.

The GTX560M offers PureVideo HD technology for video decoding. The included Video Processor 4 (VP4) supports feature set C and therefore the GPU is able to fully decode MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Part 2 (MPEG-4 ASP - e.g., DivX or Xvid), VC-1/WMV9, and H.264 (VLD, IDCT, Motion Compensation, and Deblocking). The X500 tester was able to decode the VC-1 encoded Elephants Dream video with about 3-6% CPU load (according to the task manager). The H.264 coded Big Buck Bunny video was played back with 1-3% CPU load (both 1080p videos).

Furthermore, the GPU is able to decode two 1080p streams simultaneously (e.g., Blu-Ray Picture-in-Picture).

Through CUDA, OpenCL and DirectCompute 2.1 support, the GeForce GTX 560M can be of use in general calculations. For example, the stream processor can encode videos considerably faster than can many modern CPUs. 

3D Vision enables the laptop to send 3D content (3D games, 3D Web Streaming, 3D photos, 3D Blu-Rays) to a built-in 3D-enabled screen or an external 3D TV if supported by the laptop manufacturer. 

The power consumption of the GeForce GTX 560M should be about 75 Watt (TDP including the MXM board and memory), which is about the same level of the Mobility Radeon HD 5850 - 5870. If not under load, the chip is clocked at 50/100 MHz (chip/shader) and 200/400 MHz in 2D mode and 3D mode, respectively, to save power. Furthermore, the 500M series supports Optimus to automatically switch between the integrated graphics card from Intel and the Nvidia GPU. However, whether this feature is included or not is dependent on the notebook manufacturer.

The similarly named desktop GeForce GTX 560Ti is based on the GF114 chip and offers more shader cores and significantly higher performance than the GTX 560M. The GTX 550Ti is based on the GF116 and is closer to the 560M in terms of performance, but it still features relatively higher clock speeds. Therefore, the performance of the 560M is more on par with the older desktop GeForce GTS 450.