GTX 960 is expected to launch next month.

[frozentundra123456]

I dont see the 960 as an upgrade for off the shelf systems. Most of those, except the few specifically built for gaming, have 300 watt or so psu with no six pin connector. This is where the 750/750Ti fit perfectly.

There are a few, like the Dell xps with 450 watt or so psus, where the 960 would be a nice fit when the price comes down, as well as some DIY systems with psus that have only one six pin connector.

 

[Qwertilot]

That's actually my biggest question for the 960 actually - there's obvious major differences vs 280/290 etc, which could make someone want one - but does it justify itself vs the 750ti?

Very good cooling solutions on the 960, so noise is a wash but it is more price and a bit more power.

Is the extra performance meaningful enough for the sort of market its after? Not sure. Obviously some insurance, but (m)any games that a 750ti can't at least run yet?


The thing with short mini itx cards is that I suspect the 970's aren't really quiet enough (in that form factor) to really suit. The 960 might still be too much for the form factor though, I don't know

 

[Leyawiin]

That's actually my biggest question for the 960 actually - there's obvious major differences vs 280/290 etc, which could make someone want one - but does it justify itself vs the 750ti?

Well, its about 55%-60% faster than a GTX 750 Ti compared to about 35% faster for an R9 290 vs. R9 280. Seems major enough of a difference between the 960 and 750 Ti using your example.

 

[frozentundra123456]

Agreed. I see a nice niche for the 750/750Ti in that you sacrifice a bit of performance relative to similarly priced cards, but gain a definite advantage in that you dont need an external power connector. That makes it suitable for most OEM systems and it has enough performance to make an off the shelf i5 a decent low/mid range gaming system.

The 960 does not have such a clear benefit. Granted you only need one six pin vs 2x6 or 6+8 for 280x, and so forth, but needing one six pin rules out most OEM systems without replacing the PSU.

 

[RussianSensation]

Well, its about 55%-60% faster than a GTX 750 Ti compared to about 35% faster for an R9 290 vs. R9 280. Seems major enough of a difference between the 960 and 750 Ti using your example.

Not sure I agree with that data. R9 280 is slower than a 7970, which is 114% on TPU. An after-market 290 = reference 290X, so 167%, giving us at least a 46% delta between an after-market 290 and a 280.
http://www.techpowerup.com/mobile/reviews/Palit/GeForce_GTX_960_Super_JetStream/29.html

960 costs double than a 750Ti on sale, while on sale R9 290 $240 costs 60% more than a $150 280. Therefore, in % terms, the 960 still comes out as a way worse deal. If someone wants a budget card, 750Ti for $100 or even better an R9 270 for $100-120 can be found. If you want the next level, $150 R9 280. Then if you really want a lot faster card, makes way more sense to jump all the way to an R9 290. Right now the 960 is either too slow at $200 or too expensive. Worst of all, it has 2 glaring problems: poor frame times and 2GB of VRAM. Those 2 aspects alone make it almost impossible to recommend against even a 280/280X, nevermind the 290.

Lots of 670/680/770 2GB 1080p gamers have reported problems with modern games running into VRAM bottlenecks. Not sure how this can be ingored, not to mention that pro reviews already show that games like Shadow of Mordor and AC Unity are exposing 960's memory bandwidth and VRAM bottlenecks.

 

[Magic Carpet]

Agreed. I see a nice niche for the 750/750Ti in that you sacrifice a bit of performance relative to similarly priced cards, but gain a definite advantage in that you dont need an external power connector. That makes it suitable for most OEM systems and it has enough performance to make an off the shelf i5 a decent low/mid range gaming system.

The 960 does not have such a clear benefit. Granted you only need one six pin vs 2x6 or 6+8 for 280x, and so forth, but needing one six pin rules out most OEM systems without replacing the PSU.

Been reading some, Palit GTX 960 consumes similar watts as my Asus R9 270, both featuring a single power connector. The 960 is some 20% faster @ 1080 though. Is it a big deal, of course not. Both have 2 gigs of VRAM and are rather slow to be a viable 2015 GPU purchase.

The big deal is the power connector.

And only the 750/750 ti were designed to be fed entirely off the PCI-E slot. But even then, quite a lot of vendors would throw in a power connector anyway, destroying the whole idea.... oh well. But 750 ti's are still for sale for those in need. Just saying, if you want a truly low power card, there are better options and if you don't care that much about power, you might as well get something considerably faster so you don't have to upgrade next year. After all, you get what you pay for.

 

[shady28]

While the above may or may not be accurate, those are the types of arguments one must work hard to promote when you can't win the price/performance battle. The 960 isn't a 'bad' card, it's just not as good as others on the market at a similar price for most people considering buying a videocard in January 2015.

Power consumption concerns are no longer as obscure as you may believe.

After all, why do you suppose you don't see Plasma TV's around much anymore? They are all 600 Hz refresh, with much deeper blacks and generally better color reproduction than even high end LCDs.

All these little things wind up adding up to a $500 utility bill if you make decisions based only on price / performance.

 

[tential]

Power consumption concerns are no longer as obscure as you may believe.

After all, why do you suppose you don't see Plasma TV's around much anymore? They are all 600 Hz refresh, with much deeper blacks and generally better color reproduction than even high end LCDs.

All these little things wind up adding up to a $500 utility bill if you make decisions based only on price / performance.

Yes, Plasma vs LCD was all about power consumption.

No other factors played in at all!

/sarcasm

 

[shady28]

Yes, Plasma vs LCD was all about power consumption.

No other factors played in at all!

/sarcasm

Why don't you post something useful rather than troll baiting?

 

[RussianSensation]

Why don't you post something useful rather than troll baiting?

He is right. There were many key factors that led to the demise of plasma. In no particular order:

- Persistence of burn-in (especially for early models). Plasma never managed to shake off the perception that burn-in was a real issue even when later generations handles it very well with the 'white screen' burn in fix.
- Generally thicker profile for most models
- Too difficult to manufacturer cost effective 4K panels meant plasma would remain at budget 1080P resolution
- Then there is the question of IQ. Under specialty retailer's bright lighting, plasma looks worse than LED. Read this article:
Why do plasma TVs look washed out in the store?

http://www.cnet.com/news/why-do-plasma-tvs-look-washed-out-in-the-store/

Certainly it's not conclusive that the primary case for the demise of plasma was their higher power usage. Most obvious, a lot of consumers buy what's popular or best selling as they don't do their research. Why do you think poor products like Bose and Beats sell? Just because LCDs managed to beat plasma doesn't mean most consumers chose power usage over IQ. That's not a correct assumption when other factors played a great(er) role.

As I said, both AMD and NV bombed with the 285 2GB and 960 2GB. Even if 960 and 285 2GB were $149, it would still be too hard to recommend them over a $200 R9 280X because of this:

There is just no way to ignore this if a gamer plays a wide variety of games and plans to keep the card for 2 years, since both SoM and AC Unity are modern titles and are a foreshadowing of what's to come. You think AC Victory will suddenly be 2x less demanding on VRAM/memory bandwidth than Unity? Look at games like Evolve that in beta testing are eating 2GB cards for breakfast.

Many waited 3-4 months for a 960 since 970 launched. I would strongly suggest to wait for a 960Ti 1280SP 192/bit/3GB or save up and get the 970 if you really just have to have an NV card and an R9 290 won't do. Alternatively try to find a good deal on a used 670/770 4GB of a 780.

As it standards right now NV has a huge gap between their $100 750Ti and their $330 GTX970. If someone is against AMD with $150 R9 280 or $240-250 R9 290, they are SOL. For now it seems NV essentially moved up the mid-range sweet spot for gaming to a $330 mark from $199-250 GTX460/560Ti/760 days. The relative performance of a 960 to a 970/R9 290 is simply awful.

 

[notty22]

California started the ball rolling, on the end of Plasma. You can't sell in the largest state. It's the end.

This is o/t , so my last post on this.
California Bans Power-Hog TVs: Death Knell for Plasma ...

Plasma has another problem: It's traditionally been an energy hog. And that's really bad news in light of the California Energy Commission's ruling Wednesday to ban power-hungry TVs. The Golden State will soon apply a new standard that requires new 58-inch or smaller TVs to consume 33 percent less energy by 2011, and 49 percent less by 2013.

California (i/ˌkælɨˈfɔrnjə/) is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is the most populous U.S. state,[4] home to one out of eight people who live in the U.S., with a total of 38 million people

 

[Enigmoid]

As I said, both AMD and NV bombed with the 285 2GB and 960 2GB. Even if 960 and 285 2GB were $149, it would still be too hard to recommend them over a $200 R9 280X because of this:

Nothing on this chart is playable.

Try again.

 

[RussianSensation]

Nothing on this chart is playable.

Try again.

30 million PS4/XB1 gamers find 30 fps 1080p playable.

Way to ignore SoM where 970/290 are nearly doubling the 770 2GB/960.

Also, you realize you can relax settings in AC Unity and get more performance, but it's not as if a 960 will magically close the massive gap with the 290/970.

Way to ignore games like Evolve, Titanfall, and Wolfenstein NWO on that all seem to benefit from 3GB or more. :thumbsup:

So far you provided no real valid arguments why spending $40-50 for an R9 290 with 45-50% more performance and double the VRAM is not worthwhile over the $200 GTX960. Or are you suggesting that all GPUs above $200 are not worth buying since you sure are quick to dismiss nearly 50% more performance and double the VRAM.....

California started the ball rolling, on the end of Plasma. You can't sell in the largest state. It's the end.

This is o/t , so my last post on this.
California Bans Power-Hog TVs: Death Knell for Plasma ...

Doesn't prove at all that the primary reason for the death of plasma worldwide was power usage. Executives at Samsung and Panasonic have stated in 2014 that it was too difficult to continue making plasma a viable consumer option above the budget price segment since neither firm was able to come up with a way to manufacture 4K plasma screens without pixel defect in a cost effective manner.

Also, the Saving Electricity while PC gaming hipster crowd, I fully expect all of you to bash GM200/390X when they launch using 240-275W of power, right? You should start campaigns in our CPU section that CPU overvolting and overclocking should be strongly discouraged. After-all, all that electricity and power wasted. All those 6-core i7 owners overclocking and buying them over i7 4790K for gaming, I guess they are also way behind the times, huh?

Last time I checked not one of the energy saving hippies here promoting perf/watt talked down on PC enthusiasts with overclocked i7s. Heck, some pro-energy saving i7 4900 series and 5800 series owners running them max overclocked are promoting energy savings of Maxwell. Hypocrisy at its finest displayed in full force at AT!

Only the hardcore loyalists for a certain team can hail GTX460 as one of the greatest price/performance and overclocking GPUs of all time, and then put blinders on its power usage. Yet now, price/performance, absolute performance and extra VRAM don't matter against perf/watt and power usage! How I vividly remember AT forum members discouraging people from buying GTX460s and discouraging overclocking them due to their absolutely awful perf/watt and insanely high power usage in overclocked states against the D5850/6870, oh wait.....

Perf/watt, power usage and "features" are now promoted over price/performance, absolute performance and VRAM for future games.

Goal posts shifting again to defend poor products from one's preferred brand. Oh, also coming from ex-Fermi GPU owners and ex-GTX200 owners who still bought NV when NV's perf/watt was in the toilet. Loving it!

 

[Enigmoid]

30 million PS4/XB1 gamers find 30 fps 1080p playable.

Way to ignore SoM where 970/290 are nearly doubling the 770 2GB/960.

Also, you realize you can relax settings in AC Unity and get more performance, but it's not as if a 960 will magically close the massive gap with the 290/970.

Way to ignore games like Evolve, Titanfall, and Wolfenstein NWO on that all seem to benefit from 3GB or more. :thumbsup:

So far you provided no real valid arguments why spending $40-50 for an R9 290 with 45-50% more performance and double the VRAM is not worthwhile over the $200 GTX960. Or are you suggesting that all GPUs above $200 are not worth buying since you sure are quick to dismiss nearly 50% more performance and double the VRAM.....

SoM disable ultra textures. There is a minimal IQ difference.

Many sites have said that ultra and high are nearly indistinguishable.

The graph is the wrong graph to use. Nobody buys a 290 or 970 to play at 30 fps average in a game that is known to stutter and have issues.

If you turn down the settings and get rid of the AA

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-geforce-gtx-960,4038-4.html

http://www.pcgameshardware.de/Geforce-GTX-960-Grafikkarte-259742/Specials/Test-Review-1148357/2/

http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/nvidia_msi_evga__gtx960/10.htm

http://www.hitechlegion.com/reviews...e-gtx-960-amp-edition-review?showall=&start=5

http://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/1790-nvidia-geforce-gtx-960-game-fps-benchmark-review/Page-2

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2015-nvidia-geforce-gtx-960-review

Generally the 960 is competitive with the 280/280X/770 crowd (these are not necessarily the most reputable sites). Drop the AA and the 960 jumps ahead.

I agree that the 290 for $40 more is the way to go but please don't go out of your way to cherry pick benchmarks.

TPU sucks at picking relevant settings.

From the HD 4600 review

All video card results were obtained on this exact system with exactly the same configuration.
All games were set to "high" quality, not the highest setting available.
AA and AF are applied via in-game settings, not via the driver's control panel.
Each benchmark was tested at the following settings and resolutions:
1280 x 800, 2x Anti-aliasing. Common resolution for most smaller flatscreens today (17" - 19"). A bit of eye candy turned on in the drivers.
1680 x 1050, 4x Anti-aliasing. Most common widescreen resolution on larger displays (19" - 22"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.
1920 x 1080, 4x Anti-aliasing. Typical widescreen resolution for large displays (22" - 26"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.

This is nothing but stupid.

This is even more stupid.

You can't take anything out of those graphs.

 

[shady28]

I prefer to use Tom's for overall GPU performance metrics, main reason being that they have an aggregate score for all games tested at 1080p and 2160p (4K).

This is particularly true when you're talking about a new GPU chip. There are usually trade-offs of some sort. Unfortunately those trad-offs show up in certain benchmarks that get cherry-picked by people who only see things one way.

This is how the Reference 660, 760, 770, and 960 cards stack up :

1080p :

GTx 960 :72.90
GTX 770 :82.43
GTX 760 :67.48
GTX 660 :52.00


2160p :

GTX 960 : 63.20
GTX 770 : 72.25
GTX 760 : 56.75
GTX 660 : 45.11


Gaming power consumption :

GTX 960 : 85W
GTX 770 : 175W
GTX 760 : 150W
GTX 660 : 122W

Reference :
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/...=on&prod[7249]=on&prod[7244]=on&prod[7253]=on



On comparison to AMD's R9 280 :

1080p :
R9 280 Reference : 71.90

2160p :
R9 280 Reference : 64.12

Power (Gaming) :
R9 280 Reference : 210W


So what these numbers mean overall :

There is no appreciable difference in the performance of the GTX 960 and the R9 280. For every 'representative' bench you can pick, there will be another that will disprove your theory.

As far as pricing goes, the 960 is directly targeted at the R9 280 / 285 :

As I've said before, there's a reason AMD's cards are cheap.

 

[Leyawiin]

Not sure I agree with that data. R9 280 is slower than a 7970, which is 114% on TPU. An after-market 290 = reference 290X, so 167%, giving us at least a 46% delta between an after-market 290 and a 280.
http://www.techpowerup.com/mobile/reviews/Palit/GeForce_GTX_960_Super_JetStream/29.html

960 costs double than a 750Ti on sale, while on sale R9 290 $240 costs 60% more than a $150 280. Therefore, in % terms, the 960 still comes out as a way worse deal. If someone wants a budget card, 750Ti for $100 or even better an R9 270 for $100-120 can be found. If you want the next level, $150 R9 280. Then if you really want a lot faster card, makes way more sense to jump all the way to an R9 290. Right now the 960 is either too slow at $200 or too expensive. Worst of all, it has 2 glaring problems: poor frame times and 2GB of VRAM. Those 2 aspects alone make it almost impossible to recommend against even a 280/280X, nevermind the 290.

Lots of 670/680/770 2GB 1080p gamers have reported problems with modern games running into VRAM bottlenecks. Not sure how this can be ingored, not to mention that pro reviews already show that games like Shadow of Mordor and AC Unity are exposing 960's memory bandwidth and VRAM bottlenecks.

Might have understated the difference between the R9 280 and R9 290. Probably more like 40%. The difference between the GTX 750 Ti and GTX 960 should be about right (maybe 50% between the two at the least - but probably more like 55%). The only point I was making was the person I was quoting saying there wasn't enough difference between the two GTXs to justify consideration of the 960 over the 750 Ti when he used the two R9s as an example of a difference in performance that would.

 

[frozentundra123456]

30 million PS4/XB1 gamers find 30 fps 1080p playable.

Way to ignore SoM where 970/290 are nearly doubling the 770 2GB/960.

Also, you realize you can relax settings in AC Unity and get more performance, but it's not as if a 960 will magically close the massive gap with the 290/970.

Way to ignore games like Evolve, Titanfall, and Wolfenstein NWO on that all seem to benefit from 3GB or more. :thumbsup:

So far you provided no real valid arguments why spending $40-50 for an R9 290 with 45-50% more performance and double the VRAM is not worthwhile over the $200 GTX960. Or are you suggesting that all GPUs above $200 are not worth buying since you sure are quick to dismiss nearly 50% more performance and double the VRAM.....



Doesn't prove at all that the primary reason for the death of plasma worldwide was power usage. Executives at Samsung and Panasonic have stated in 2014 that it was too difficult to continue making plasma a viable consumer option above the budget price segment since neither firm was able to come up with a way to manufacture 4K plasma screens without pixel defect in a cost effective manner.

Also, the Saving Electricity while PC gaming hipster crowd, I fully expect all of you to bash GM200/390X when they launch using 240-275W of power, right? You should start campaigns in our CPU section that CPU overvolting and overclocking should be strongly discouraged. After-all, all that electricity and power wasted. All those 6-core i7 owners overclocking and buying them over i7 4790K for gaming, I guess they are also way behind the times, huh?

Last time I checked not one of the energy saving hippies here promoting perf/watt talked down on PC enthusiasts with overclocked i7s. Heck, some pro-energy saving i7 4900 series and 5800 series owners running them max overclocked are promoting energy savings of Maxwell. Hypocrisy at its finest displayed in full force at AT!

Only the hardcore loyalists for a certain team can hail GTX460 as one of the greatest price/performance and overclocking GPUs of all time, and then put blinders on its power usage. Yet now, price/performance, absolute performance and extra VRAM don't matter against perf/watt and power usage! How I vividly remember AT forum members discouraging people from buying GTX460s and discouraging overclocking them due to their absolutely awful perf/watt and insanely high power usage in overclocked states against the D5850/6870, oh wait.....

Perf/watt, power usage and "features" are now promoted over price/performance, absolute performance and VRAM for future games.

Goal posts shifting again to defend poor products from one's preferred brand. Oh, also coming from ex-Fermi GPU owners and ex-GTX200 owners who still bought NV when NV's perf/watt was in the toilet. Loving it!

Do you not understand the concept of efficiency or are you being deliberately obtuse? Most dont criticize an overclocked i7, because it gives better performance than a dual core or the same cpu stock. Nobody is arguing that you cant run a powerful video card or overclocked cpu because it uses more power than a less highly performing one.

Those arguing for efficiency are simply arguing that lower power use at a similar performance is a plus. That is of course only one factor. You are certainly free to decide the card is not for you because of a variety of other reasons, but to deride those who favor power savings as hippies or biased in favor of another company is hardly fair.

 

[voodoo7817]

to deride those who favor power savings as hippies or biased in favor of another company is hardly fair.

I agree some (most?) of Russian's rhetoric is strong, but I think it's reasonable to be suspicious when a large number of people who claim to be unbiased are trying REALLY hard to obfuscate the disappointment of the performance of the 960. I'm not saying this is you, but there are definitely a few in this thread. And I don't really care about the reasons why these people are trying so hard, but it is suspicious. However, as someone who was in the market for the card in the $200-$250 range with the best bang-for-the-buck, I'm glad I knew enough to ignore them.

 

[Haserath]

Do you not understand the concept of efficiency or are you being deliberately obtuse? Most dont criticize an overclocked i7, because it gives better performance than a dual core or the same cpu stock. Nobody is arguing that you cant run a powerful video card or overclocked cpu because it uses more power than a less highly performing one.

Those arguing for efficiency are simply arguing that lower power use at a similar performance is a plus. That is of course only one factor. You are certainly free to decide the card is not for you because of a variety of other reasons, but to deride those who favor power savings as hippies or biased in favor of another company is hardly fair.

I don't remember people not advocating Fermi when AMD had better efficiency, which Russian pointed out.

People bought 560 Ti's and 570's despite AMD offering a 6950 2GB that was unlockable&more efficient for the 560 price. They even started running into Vram bottlenecks fairly quickly.

Now AMD offers 50% more performance and 100% more useful Vram for 20-30% more but lower efficiency, and now efficiency is really important?

 

[RussianSensation]

Do you not understand the concept of efficiency or are you being deliberately obtuse? Most dont criticize an overclocked i7, because it gives better performance than a dual core or the same cpu stock. Nobody is arguing that you cant run a powerful video card or overclocked cpu because it uses more power than a less highly performing one.

Those arguing for efficiency are simply arguing that lower power use at a similar performance is a plus. That is of course only one factor. You are certainly free to decide the card is not for you because of a variety of other reasons, but to deride those who favor power savings as hippies or biased in favor of another company is hardly fair.

No, they really are not. They purposely downplay benchmarks that show VRAM bottlenecks affecting performance and suggest turning down textures to create a more favorable scenario for a 2GB card. That means they expect us to keep turning down textures in other future PC titles that benefit from > 2GB of VRAM. The second thing they do is use average fps for a 960 when TechSpot clearly showed that 960 has poor frame times compared to a 280X. Therefore, while it appears that a 280X is only 15% faster, if you looked at the frame times, the gap in real world frame delivery is much bigger than 15%. This is also ignored.

Also, their arguments are inconsistent in other ways. They try to downplay R9 290 since it technically isn't a $200 card, but then they compare a 960 to an R9 280, but ignore the $50 price gap that's often there.

In other words, they are not really comparing 2 products with similar performance but one using less power. What they are doing instead is trying to ignore VRAM and frame times data to make it seem that the performance is similar.

Regarding overclocked i7, a 5820K or 4930K OC hardly gains anything in games over a stock 4790K. Therefore, someone advocating perf/watt and efficiency for gaming with such overclocked processors wouldn't hype up Maxwell's power usage over R9 200 series as that's hypocrisy. If you use a 6-core highly overclocked i7 for other than games, OK.

Finally, Qwertilot actually made very good arguments but even he admits that the value proposition of a 960 for a MOBA gamer is questionable over NV's own $100 750Ti. What we have is a $200 card from NV that's too fast for light gaming and MOBA games, but too expensive as a budget card, and way too slow for high end 1080p gaming. It sits in no-man's land today, at least based on Canadian/US pricing. Using Perf/watt to obfuscate this seems to be the key theme here.

Trying to cherry-pick data to show that a 960 is an 85W card is some bias alright. The card is easily a 120-125W one:
http://www.techpowerup.com/mobile/reviews/Palit/GeForce_GTX_960_Super_JetStream/27.html

In the context of total system power usage, the power gap is not as dramatic as is being portrayed -- another tactic used to hide how perf/watt scales in the context of the overall system. Take a look at % increase in total system power of an 290 vs. 960 i7 4770k rig, then compare their performance delta. All of a sudden, the extra power usage of the 290 is justified since it's actually 45-50% faster. But they don't want to compare perf/watt of the entire system because it undermines their entire efficiency argument:

http://www.techspot.com/review/946-nvidia-geforce-gtx-960/page7.html

By comparing only perf/watt of 1 card to the other, you are really comparing the architecture efficiency of the particular SKU, but not the actual FPS/watt gaming system efficiency the gamer will actually experience because you cannot just run a videocard on its own.

 

[raghu78]

SoM disable ultra textures. There is a minimal IQ difference.

Many sites have said that ultra and high are nearly indistinguishable.

The graph is the wrong graph to use. Nobody buys a 290 or 970 to play at 30 fps average in a game that is known to stutter and have issues.

If you turn down the settings and get rid of the AA

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-geforce-gtx-960,4038-4.html

http://www.pcgameshardware.de/Geforce-GTX-960-Grafikkarte-259742/Specials/Test-Review-1148357/2/

http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/nvidia_msi_evga__gtx960/10.htm

http://www.hitechlegion.com/reviews...e-gtx-960-amp-edition-review?showall=&start=5

http://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/1790-nvidia-geforce-gtx-960-game-fps-benchmark-review/Page-2

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2015-nvidia-geforce-gtx-960-review

Generally the 960 is competitive with the 280/280X/770 crowd (these are not necessarily the most reputable sites). Drop the AA and the 960 jumps ahead.

I agree that the 290 for $40 more is the way to go but please don't go out of your way to cherry pick benchmarks.

TPU sucks at picking relevant settings.

GTX 960 competitive with R9 280X. That is the biggest pile of crap I have heard. R9 280X is 15 - 20% faster on avg.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/MSI/GTX_960_Gaming/29.html
http://www.computerbase.de/2015-01/nvidia-geforce-gtx-960-im-test/7/
http://www.sweclockers.com/recension/19925-geforce-gtx-960-fran-asus-gigabyte-och-msi/17#pagehead
http://www.hardware.fr/articles/932-22/recapitulatif-performances.html

btw did you even see the pcgameshardware review before linking it. 22% faster on average. AC Unity - R9 280X avg fps - 1.6 x GTX 960 perf min fps - 1.5 x GTX 960 (btw perfectly playable fps ) and WatchDogs - avg fps 1.3 x GTX 960 and min fps - 2.2 x GTX 960 performance. This is the problem with the 2GB cards. The performance craters when you try to run at the highest texture settings and you run out of VRAM.

www.pcgameshardware.de/Geforce-GTX-960-Grafikkarte-259742/Specials/Test-Review-1148357/2/

3Dcenter had an average of 15% higher perf for R9 280X from multiple reviews

http://www.3dcenter.org/artikel/lau...launch-analyse-nvidia-geforce-gtx-960-seite-2

R9 280X decimates the GTX 960 when it matters most - in the latest and most demanding games at the highest playable settings. Middle Earth Shadow of Mordor, AC Unity, WatchDogs etc

Middle Earth Shadow of Mordor again shows > 1.6x perf on R9 280X

http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/graphics/79726-asus-strix-gtx-960-directcu-ii/?page=8

Next time get your facts straight. the R9 280X is in a different league altogether from GTX 960.

 

[USER8000]

I have not see such delusion since the 8600GT and 2600XT were launched and people were trying to "sell" how great those were. Funny we have a similar situation now with the GTX960 and R9 285. Newer does not always mean better.

 

[cusideabelincoln]

I don't remember people not advocating Fermi when AMD had better efficiency, which Russian pointed out.

People bought 560 Ti's and 570's despite AMD offering a 6950 2GB that was unlockable&more efficient for the 560 price. They even started running into Vram bottlenecks fairly quickly.

Now AMD offers 50% more performance and 100% more useful Vram for 20-30% more but lower efficiency, and now efficiency is really important?

That's when the efficiency argument began, and also when reviews were in the infancy of exploring power consumption. People did point that stuff out, but they were labeled AMD fanboys....

Anyway, I still think reviewers should measure power consumption for every benchmark they do and report the average and peak power consumption over the course of the benchmark run. Basically just like measuring frametimes for each game, because cards don't perform consistently from one game to another.

The data we get now is taking the average performance of a card over a wide array of games yet we only get to see the power consumption from one sample of that array.

 

[Qwertilot]

That would be a good idea

One other thing worth considering is that the AAA console ports really are a relatively small part of the set of games on Steam/GoG etc nowadays - you could very happily exist without ever playing one of them. They do tend to dominate benchmarks though.

Natural in many ways as they will tend to be more graphically ambitious overall, but far from all these things are pure indy style games. Has anyone established what a sane bar for reasonable performance in the more testing ones is?

I suspect the 750ti is plenty, but there might well be scope for wanting more. Especially if you're after 60/120(?) on some of the more 3D shooter style stuff. Might be a logical niche for the 960 there.

Total War something of a poster boy I guess, and that is benchmarked, but a lot of other things. It would be really rather surprising if there's the same sort of vram bottle neck involved.

 

[frozentundra123456]

I agree some (most?) of Russian's rhetoric is strong, but I think it's reasonable to be suspicious when a large number of people who claim to be unbiased are trying REALLY hard to obfuscate the disappointment of the performance of the 960. I'm not saying this is you, but there are definitely a few in this thread. And I don't really care about the reasons why these people are trying so hard, but it is suspicious. However, as someone who was in the market for the card in the $200-$250 range with the best bang-for-the-buck, I'm glad I knew enough to ignore them.

I dont really see that many people trying to defend the card. In fact, quite the opposite. I have never seen so much venom direct at a product, although admittedly a medicore one.