Gadgetory

hey Ron I'm Steve from gamers Nexis dotnet and today we're looking at Nvidia's new gtx 950 video card with me here I have the Asus Strix model of the gtx 950 part of their Strix lineup and this video card is brand new it launches at an interesting price point of 160 dollars which i'll discuss why that's interesting in a moment and in terms of specs you're going to be pretty familiar with most of it because it is the GM 206 GPU so that's got to GPU clusters 6 streaming multi processors 768 cuda cores chips the base clock of 1024 megahertz has a boost of 11 88 megahertz and it's got I feel look at my paper here 48 TM use so much the same as the other GM 206 products but the difference here is that it's been toned down a little bit for the gtx 950 video card so this launch is a 2 gigabyte product on 128-bit memory interface so that does sound small and it is to be fair but it's not a linear comparison between Maxwell and Kepler in terms of the memory bandwidth because NVIDIA has done a lot of optimizations on Maxwell and this is something we've discussed in our GTX 980 reviews and those optimizations mean that the CUDA cores are about 40 percent more efficient than on Kepler and this efficiency has gained through optimizations like Delta color compression which looks at the Delta of colors between frames so temporally and then it just determines the Delta value to effectively print out for the new color rather than the absolute value and that's all discussed in great depth in our GTX 980 reviews check that if you're curious about what that all means but same deal here with the GTX 950 so the memory is a bit more efficient and the CUDA core is a bit more efficient than Kepler but that doesn't mean it struggles a bit in non gaming tasks but you're really not going to be using a GTX 950 and production tasks anyway the GTX 950 is priced at $160 MSRP but scales all the way up to $180 from we're told for the pre overclocked cards this one I believe is priced at $170 for its pre overclocked and it's Strix cooler which is actually fairly quiet and efficient it uses the same act of idol cooling switch that we've seen in previous tricks models so if it's not under heavy load it'll just run idle and use the passive cooling for dissipation that would be the heatsink and the one $60 price point puts the GTX 950 in a weird place competitively it's basically price against the r7 370 which is a few bucks cheaper and the r7 370 is a video card we do not have but we do have the r9 270x and if you look at any benchmarks out there they are effectively identical in performance so we will be using those two or the the 270x effectively as a stand-in obviously there's some differences there but that's the best we've got and the other priced items nearby would be the gtx 960 at a pretty massive $40 jump at $200 for two gigabytes or more for 4 gigabytes the r9 380 which has replaced some of AMD's r200 cards is priced at $200 so again fairly big jump from a gtx 950 which makes it an awkward transition into that next bracket and then below the 950 is the gtx 750ti in the 130 to 140 dollar price point so really the the main competition up at bat would be the r7 370 the 270 X if you're replacing one of those but otherwise you're looking at something like a 750 Ti or equivalent or gtx 960 r9 380 something like that the main technological advancement that Nvidia is marketing for the gtx 950 is something that advances mobile gaming they basically have said that look MOBAs are a huge market right now which is accurate and they've said that the biggest item of concern to mobile gamers that Nvidia polled was input latency and that's something that we hear similarly from csgo players Starcraft players rest in peace and other games of that nature so input latency is the delay view time between the time you click the mouse or hit the keyboard input and the time that you see the impact in-game and normally for a lot of us gamers it's so quick that it's really almost unnoticeable for hyper-competitive folks in the MOBA and RTS fields and competitive FPS fields it actually is a noticeable factor so NVIDIA has cited its GTX 6 fifties performance metrics for input latency as the item to compare the gtx 950 against and they've told us that the 650 had an input latency of about 80 milliseconds in dota 2 against the gtx at 950 is 45 milliseconds so quite a drop there almost half that's a 35 millisecond decline and this is not something we can validate right now or test on other devices it's something that I'd love to do in the near future and hope to do after pax but it basically requires a middle hardware solution so in our dueño computer or something like that sitting in between your input device and your game and that can measure the the latency between delivery of the actual input that is something we'll be working on in the future but basically that's the gist of what NVIDIA has set is improved this time around and that is something that will be pushed out through GeForce experience in short order so the way this works is pretty interesting if you're into graphics and pipelines and videos primary changes have been to the graphics pipeline which is what you're looking at here the graphics pipeline is named appropriately because without the previous items in the pipe clearing production basically is halted and the pipeline is limited by the slowest phase which in this case is generally the GPU render that's when the longest pole is in the pipeline and if you look at this closely you'll see the game engine passes its frames to the API which in this case is DirectX 11 or 12 and then DirectX has to continue advancing the frame render from there so once DirectX is done with the frame it passes that frame to the GPU for a final pass and render work which then sends the frame to the screen you've probably seen the word pre buffered frames before in some games is something we've talked about I think with maybe titanfall and pre buffered frames is basically how many frames the GPU sits in a buffer before progressing in the pipeline it's often - for a lot of games but you can get away with just one pre buffered frame in games like dota League of Legends and heroes of the storm which are the three games that NVIDIA has advertised as having the reduced input latency for the GTX 950 and removing the second inflight frame the second pre buffered frame from the pipeline is what allows and to decrease its input latency without sacrificing gameplay or visuals some games do actually need multiple pre buffered frames far cry 4 is a good example where it increases the smoothness and performance of your gaming experience so you really don't want to sacrifice that second frame in the buffer but for dota lowland heroes of the storm it's not really necessary doesn't detract from the experience in fact it detracts negatively to have the second pre buffer frame because you're increasing the input latency this much is fact and we are certain of so removing the pre buffered frame from the pipe is what gives the latency advantage here but that's only in three games it's only in the MOBAs you're not going to see that anywhere else you're not gonna see where it's detrimental so it's a pretty limited and niche marketing option here for the gtx 950 let's just jump straight into the gaming benchmarks here and see what this card's all about csgo and dota 2 are both a non-issue for high FPS high settings gaming with the gtx 950 you can easily hit more than 100 FPS with settings tuning in both games and it should be noted that both of these games are playable on AP use and on some iGPS depending on your settings so being able to play on a 950 isn't necessarily profound but it is a more capable solution than the IG PS and ap use obviously moving on to other games with grid Autosport the game is perfectly playable at 1080p ultra with maxed out lighting and ambient occlusion Landing the GTX 950 at about 67 FPS on average and the GTX 950 retains fluidity with frame delivery and it's high 1% and 0.1% low metrics so it's actually got pretty high numbers for the 1% 0.1% frame times with grid we see the GTX 950 falling noticeably behind the GTX 960 with a 15 percent performance differential for the 40 or so dollar difference in price and the r9 380 holds only a 4.3 percent advantage over the GTX 950 the GTX 950 pulls ahead of the gtx 750ti by 25% which is a pretty massive difference and that's the difference between playing 60 FPS er over 60 fps so actually a pretty big jump there if you can afford the price difference but we'll talk about whether that's worth it or not in a moment looking at Far Cry 4 you really need to dip to medium settings or similar to play Far Cry 4 on the gtx 950 because at our normal 1080p ultra configuration it just can't keep up with other devices or with the game for that matter and that's because it's sort of a weird mid-range but sort of budget card the gtx 950 struggles to play GTA 5 at our very high and high test configuration which basically sets the game to its maximum settings - the advanced graphics settings and the 950 pushed 47 FPS average against the 960 is 52 there are 9 285 55 and the r9 380 s 57 when switching to high settings which is a drop in settings output we see the gtx 950 pull into the range of 74 FPS with again very high 1% and 0.1% frame time metrics so that actually makes the gtx at 950 faster than the r9 285 and GTA 5 with high settings despite a slowdown at very high the gtx 950 is 6.5 ish percent slower than the GTX 960 in GTA 5 at high and 5.2 percent slower than the r9 380 Metro is another game where the gtx 950 struggles to keep up at very high and high requiring a dip closer to medium to keep up with the game and the 950 runs 14% slower than the gtx 960 20% slower than the r9 380 and r9 285 and runs faster than the r9 270x by 9% which if you remember the 270x is about equivalent to an r7 370 there's only a couple of frames increase one or two at this range but that's about it Mordor shadow of Mordor is unplayable that ultra but we see a climb to 65 FPS at medium making the GTX 950 reasonable if you're ok with dropping the settings a little bit and note that the GTX 950 Albert the 270x just about everywhere which is where the r7 370 lands so that does make it a competitive offering moving on to thermals and wattage keep in mind that thermals will vary depending upon the manufacturers so we've got an asus strix here the gtx 950 Strix sits at forty three point nine three Celsius when using automatic fan settings and that's plenty cool it's a non-issue for gaming and really anything in this range will work well this is delta T over ambient so you're getting closer to 60 Celsius if you have a 74 degree fahrenheit house and 60 Celsius really is very acceptable for a gaming video card when under 100 percent load looking at the wattage we see power draw peak system load sits at 199 watts and this is a measurement of what the entire system draws when under full load on the CPU and GPU so it's not just the video card it's everything and that means that you can get away with about a three 100 350 watt power supply depending on your CPU memory and drive configuration if you're running something a little bit lower end than the 4790k a 350 watt power supply 300 watt power supply even would get by just fine those are obviously a little little hard to find most manufacturers don't make them that small but you get the idea this is just barely below the gtx 960 which has a higher 120 watt TDP and 60 watts below the competing r9 380 solution the gtx 950 is a good card but it sits at an awkward price point at $160 those with a more aggressive budget would be better looking at the GTX so does DTI or similar and those with a larger budget would be better looking into the GTX 960 the r9 380 or similar options and the difference here between the 950 and the 960 or the r9 380 is actually pretty substantial in a lot of games it is the difference between lowering your settings and not doing that so if you are one of those players who does not like to sacrifice graphics very much if at all then you really do want to increase your budget by about $40 maybe a little more than that and get something higher-end if you care less about going from ultra or very high down to medium and you just care about being able to play your game affordably the GTX 950 is not a bad solution in fact it's pretty good it's only direct competition is the r7 370 which is effectively identical to the r9 270x in terms of performance there's a slight gain but not much and the gtx 950 does outperform that solution and all the tests we ran and it's a better performer thermally and in terms of wattage depending on which manufacturer you get for the thermals so that does make the gtx 950 something we choose over the r7 370 but again this is an awkward price point so it's rare that in the type of build I recommend I would venture in this area to begin with because I'm normally looking at a budgeted 750ti or a higher-end r9 380 GTX 960 or equivalent for those who do happen to fall into this price category this is not a bad video card it is something that we can confidently recommend in terms of driver support and function and games just keep in mind you will have to sacrifice some of your settings for the triple-a titles for games like MOBAs for dota 2 league of legends and heroes of the storm in particular or future games like overwatch you can actually expect very good performance with this it will run those just fine at max settings or near max we're not hundred percent sure how overwatch will be yet and then for the MOBAs in the listing I just gave you DotA Lowell and hots the latency advantage here is actually supposed to be somewhat significant depending on how hyper competitive you are so if you're very competitive gamer you will notice a latency advantage with the newer Maxwell cards this is something that my understanding is we pushed throughout the platform so it'll be distributed through GeForce experience that means that if you already own a higher-end card it's not like you're gonna need to downgrade to a GTX 950 to get that input latency advantage so that is something to keep in mind here it is being Co marketed with the 950 but is not necessarily mutually exclusive with it if that makes sense so that is the GTX at 950 that's all we have to say really about the asus strix model of the car check out the article in the description below for the full review and you want to see the text the chart and the drill-down of the architecture and of course if you like our coverage please look into our patreon page it's linked in the post roll video big thanks to the eight of you so far who have supported us they're sort of starting small but it is a big help to get the patreon backers because it lets us move away from traditional advertising and hopefully diminish the ads on the site as well so that's all for now I will see you all next time peace