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Nvidia launches GTX 950, performance at the $159 price point

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by , 09-01-2015 at 07:33 PM (1269 Views)



Over the last year, Nvidia has slowly and steadily introduced a new line of GPUs to replace its aging Kepler family. The latest entry in the GTX 900 series, the GTX 950, is based on the same GM 206 GPU as the GTX 960, but drops a few CUDA cores and some texture mapping units to hit its new targets. The GTX 950 contains two graphics processing clusters (GPCs), 768 cores, 48 texture units, and 32 ROPS. That’s cut back a fair ways from the GTX 960, at 1024 cores, 64 TMUs, and the same 32 ROPs, but it should offer significantly improved performance over both the GTX 750 Ti and the GTX 650 Ti.

Zotac’s GTX 950

The GTX 950 also doubles up on memory (2GB instead of 1GB) and offers 6.6GHz of 128-bit bandwidth. Both the 750 Ti and 650 Ti had just 5.4GHz of GDDR5 bandwidth, though the 750 Ti wowed us back then with its impressive memory bandwidth efficiency and overall performance, even if the card wasn’t an overall performance winner against AMD’s hardware. This time around, the GTX 950 has a better hand to deal, and AMD ends up rocked on its heels.

Because Nvidia decided to launch in the middle of IDF, most publications haven’t had time yet to look at the card itself. One exception is Guru3D, which has put together a fairly comprehensive evaluation of the GTX 950, 960, and AMD’s lower-end products. They also catalog the performance difference between OEM specialty cards, which typically retail for more money ($169 – $179, compared to a base price of $159) and the vanilla-flavored GTX 950.

Unfortunately, AMD is fighting relatively new Maxwell hardware with GCN-based GPUs that are much older. AMD’s $149 GPU, the R7 370, does include a 4GB RAM buffer, but its performance can’t quite match the GTX 950. The graph excerpt below shows performance in a common title we also test, BioShock Infinite.


This kind of discrepancy typifies the comparison, though the exact figures can vary from title to title. At best, the R7 370 is always a few frames behind the GTX 950, even if you only compare the default GTX 950 and not the Asus or Palit cards. While it’s true that the R7 370 is also slightly cheaper than Nvidia’s card, the $10 price difference probably isn’t enough to balance the scales.

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