On January 22nd, Nvidia revealed their new video card, the GTX 960. It weighs in with 2 GB’s of GDDR5 VRAM, 1024 Cuda cores, only requires one six-pin PCI-E power input, and a price of only $200.
The GPU performs nearly as well as the aging GTX 770, and will consistently outperform AMD solutions such as the r9 280 and 280x, which are all over $300 as of the time of this overview. This means that the 960 has excellent performance for the price, and Nvidia has pulled another one out of the hat here, with an inexpensive GPU that performs as well as significantly higher priced GPU’s(at time of print).
The Nvidia GTX 960 also has support for a wide variety of new Nvidia technologies, such as SLI, Cuda, Physx, GPU Boost 2.0, and all the other usual technologies Nvidia includes with their high-end cards. There are a few new additions to the Nvidia technologies, such as MFAA (an alternative to MSAA), and DSR (digital super-resolution) which allows you to make the game you are running look significantly better.
This is done by upscaling the resolution of your game and then displaying it at your screen’s resolution. In other words, say you have a 1920×1080 monitor, DSR will make the game run at 4k (or another resolution you pick) and display it on your 1920×1080 monitor. The effect is that the game will appear much smoother to the eye – it’s basically an extra layer of AA! The only downside of this is that you need some awesome hardware to run 4k games, so performance will take a hit.
Nvidia’s GTX 960 video-card will also support DirectX 12 – which is coming with Windows 10.
The GTX 960 is one of the best overclocking cards Nvidia has made so far in Maxwell. The original clock speeds are 1127 MHz core and 7.o Gbps on the memory. The average overclock on Hwbot.org is around 1400 MHz core, a 25% increase! That is one heck of an overclock, especially for this kind of card!
To wrap things up, the GTX 960 is a brand-new video-card that hits the market at a mid-range price, and has some impressive performance for the price! The only downsides is the 2 GB’s of VRAM which is going to limit its potential in games like Shadow of Mordor and Theif, 2GB really is a fairly small amount for such a high-end card. Other than that, this card is one of the best mid-range cards out there right now!.
Will you be buying the GTX 960? Do you think AMD with drop the prices of their GPUs to match Nvidia? let us know in the comments.
