Gadgetory

hey Ron this is Steve from gamers access dotnet and today we're talking about this this is a new video card is the gtx 960 running the GM 206 GPU from nvidia so this is a new nvidia card and i just benchmarked it against everything the Embargo just lifted it is available online today but do check all of our framerate results before you buy because we take these tests very seriously and conduct them all objectively and fairly it has been tested against the 760 the 770 the 970 the r9 285 the r9 270x and all those cards what you need to know about this new video card is that it is available for $200 MSRP this specific card is the asus strix 960 which is the one i tested it is available at $210 MSRP ZOTAC and EVGA both have overclocking options already available and both of those will be available at about 200 bucks no more than 210 for sure so that's sort of the price range in terms of specs the gtx 960 reference will have 2 gigabytes of RAM that is set for all cards it will not exceed 2 gigabytes of RAM as it stands now in the GM 206 you've got 8 SMS each one of those hosts 128 CUDA cores and that means you get a total of 1024 to two cores for the whole thing so while Kepler GPUs my out number the coup de coeur account they are more efficient because they're sharing a greater pool of memory it's 92 kilobytes versus 64 plus there's 24 kilobytes for some other process you can read all about it on the link in the description below or on the annotation right now if I put that up so that's the architecture the effective memory speed is 93 hundred megahertz after accounting for the memory compression and delta color correction and what both of those do is effectively compress the data per frame that you're storing in the frame buffer that's the two gigabytes of video ram you're compressing that data by about 25% it's using 25 fewer bytes per frame so that's happening because of delta color correction which is basically looking temporally at a frame meaning over time it looks at the previous frame the next frame that's impending and it says okay what colors have not changed and then it doesn't fetch those again it doesn't need to calculate those colors a second time that saves you a lot of memory bandwidth and that's true with the 980 as well so this is not news to anyone the next major advancement for the 960 over the 760 is TDP which is a trend in the industry right now even AMD has caught on and TDP for the 960 is 120 watts it is capable of running games like League of Legends and dota 2 and Team Fortress 2 and generally low requirements games at 30 watts that means this does not need to run even its fans in the case of the asus strix and in the case of some of the other impending devices from other manufacturers so in this video cards case the easiest rigs it will actually spin down one or both fans depending on the load of the GPU so if you're playing League of Legends on this which is really unnecessary to have this for the League of Legends but if you're doing it it will turn these fans off run at about 30 watts and you're saving a ton of power and you're not really burning you're not generating a lot of heat in the system that the CPU will suck up into its fan so good all around for the entire system the most immediate competitors to this card are going to be AMD s r9 285 which is priced at about the same price about 210 dollars and there are nine to 80 which is about $180 below that you've got things like the 270x and things like that they're gonna be outclassed by the gtx 960 in terms of cards above this it's really on NVIDIA side it's just the GTX 970 that's it that's all there is above this unless you go way higher than that and give the 980 so what does that mean that means there's a gap between $200 for this and about 300 350 dollars for 970 that is a massive gap that is a gap big enough to drive a TI through so I am expecting some sort of Ti in the future there has been nothing in Ostia I'm not being cheeky here we don't even have any inside info so that's that's sort of just speculation let's look at the benchmarks to the GTX at 960 so in terms of performance you can look at all of our benchmark test methodology in the link in the description below on the article testing first with Metro last light the GTX 960 got about 52 FPS average and the r9 285 got about see 5 FPS average they're very close that's basically within margin of error so they're effectively the same performance for Metro last light and that's a good thing because that means this is a serious competitor to the r9 285 which yes it does outperforming by a few frames but for about 70 watts last TDP that's pretty good that's that's very competitive looking at the GTX 760 in Metro last light the 960 pretty handily outperforms the 760 so this is actually a big jump from one generation to the next in grid Autosport again we see a slight advantage going to the r9 285 which performs at about 80 fps and the gtx 960 performs about 78 FPS average these are both average numbers and that is again within margin of error it's like 2% difference so pretty good but not quite a definitive yes or no on whether you should buy this card over the r9 285 in Far Cry 4 again the GTX 960 performing at about 70 fps and that's very handily outperforming the GTX 760 which sits at about 53 fps that is a huge difference from one generation to the next that's more than 30 percent difference in fact and at that it's actually becoming worthwhile to upgrade from a 760 to a 960 but hold on to your money generally you're going to want to upgrade from something earlier than a 760 because that's still a pretty well performing card right now unless you're really dying for 4 high graphics in games and you don't have the budget for more expensive card now this is where the gtx 960 starts to show off and put AMD to shame a little bit in battlefield 4 on ultra settings maxed out at 1080p the gtx 960 performed at over 60 fps 63 and the r9 285 performed at 53 FPS and this is a game that was optimized with AMD it's one of the few in fact that has been optimized recently for andy's specifically by the developer during the launch cycle nvidia sort of sucks up all the other companies so that is a big lead for the gtx 960 to carry over the 285 in battlefield in Assassin's Creed so unsurprisingly because it has been optimized heavily for via the gtx 960 leads at 53 FPS over 48 fps for the 285 and the 960 in some instances will beat out these 770 I'll throw a few more benchmarks up as I'm closing out the video you can check all of these charts in the link in the description below including some that are not shown here so do check those out the gtx 960 then should you buy it it really depends on the hole this is a very impressive card when you're looking at the TDP against the performance it performs very well and it has a TDP of 120 watts which is lower than any other card of this performance thus far and it's priced at $200 that is a somewhat threatening price to AMD and Vidya already effectively dominates the upper end of the market with the 970 and 980 that is almost unarguable and although the price is good on the to 90 and 290x those two cards are just the best period so that leaves AMD owning the budget and mid-range markets which they've always done from the 265 up to the 280x 285 now and there hasn't really been any competition there for AMD that's where the 960 comes in there's been no real reason to buy 760 for a long time now and the 750 Ti is great in its own right it's very low TDP but it's still not as good as say a 270 X or something like that which is priced fairly similarly at this point so the 960 shakes the market up a lot it somewhat invalidates some of AMD's nearby offerings and it is very threatening to the 285 which performs almost identically consumes 70 watts more doesn't quite have the same level of driver support and this is this is something that people will argue with me about in the comments I'm sure but definitively Nvidia releases more drivers more frequently and Andy's gotten a lot better with it since Omega don't get me wrong they've gotten way better since Omega but there's there some of that tinge in your mouth of bad drivers in the past so at the end of the day the GTX 960 is a very good card it is worth buying if you're trying to build a system in a mid-range price if you're trying to build in a budget look at the 272 270 X on 50 TI depending on your needs if you're building an HCP see this is awesome if you can afford a $200 card for an HCP see because lo TDP low heat means that you're not going to be overheating your other components in a small case in terms of the 285 it's worth considering I would personally opt for a 960 in most instances unless I really want that extra couple of frames per second and even then the difference between this and the 285 is close enough that driver updates between AMD and NVIDIA well I mean they trade blows with each other constantly so you're gonna see these two cards battling it out and overtaking one another they're effectively identical in terms of fps so it just comes down to the other things that you need and whether those are worth one company or another to you so that is the gtx 960 check on the description below for more information you can find out where to buy it in the article all that good stuff please tweet at us if you have any questions whatsoever if we get enough of them I may do a roundup video and that is all for this time I will see you all next time peace you