A refresh of the Fermi based GeForce 400 series, the GeForce 500 series is a series of graphics processing units developed by Nvidia, first released on November 9, 2010 with the GeForce GTX 580. Its direct competitor was AMD's Radeon HD 6000 Series; they were launched approximately a month apart. Overview The Nvidia Geforce 500 series graphics cards are significantly modified versions of the GeForce 400 series graphics cards, in terms of performance and power management. Like the Nvidia GeForce 400 series graphics cards, the Nvidia Geforce 500 series supports DirectX 11.0,OpenGL 4.6, and OpenCL 1.1. The refreshed Fermi chip includes 512 stream processors, grouped in 16 stream multiprocessors clusters (each with 32 CUDA cores), and is manufactured by TSMC in a 40 nm process. The Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 graphics card is the first in the Nvidia GeForce 500 series to use a fully enabled chip based on the refreshed Fermi architecture, with all 16 stream multiprocessors clusters and all six 64-bit memory controllers active. The new GF110 GPU was enhanced with full speed FP16 filtering (the previous generation GF100 GPU could only do half-speed FP16 filtering) and improved z-culling units. On January 25, 2011, Nvidia launched the GeForce GTX 560 Ti, to target the "sweet spot" segment where price/performance ratio is considered important. With its more than 30% improvement over the GTX 460, and performance in between the Radeon HD 6870 and 6950 1GB, the GTX 560 Ti directly replaced the GeForce GTX 470. On February 17, 2011, it was reported that the GeForce GTX 550 Ti would be launching on March 15, 2011. Although the GTX 550 Ti is a GF116 mainstream chip, Nvidia chose to name its new card the GTX 550 Ti, and not the GTS 550. Performance was shown to be at least comparable and up to 12% faster than the current Radeon HD 5770. Price-wise, the new card trod into the range occupied by the GeForce GTX 460 (768 MB) and the Radeon HD 6790. On March 24, 2011, the GTX 590 was launched as the flagship graphics card for Nvidia. The GTX 590 is a dual-GPU card, similar to past releases such as the GTX 295, and boasted the potential to handle Nvidia's 3D Vision technology by itself. On April 13, 2011, the GT 520 was launched as the bottom-end card in the range, with lower performance than the equivalent number cards