GeForce GTX 960 performance review: NVIDIA targets the "sweet spot" GFX market (Updated)

** Updated on 28th Jan - We've updated the article to include more references and performance figures of a Radeon R9 280 graphics card to provide an updating conclusion as to how the new NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 fares. The original article was first published on 22nd Jan.

Maxwell goes mainstream

To kick off the new year for the discrete graphics market segment, NVIDIA has launched the GeForce GTX 960 graphics card. If you are wondering why we taken off the mantle to reveal an add-in card partner's ware, i.e., the ASUS GeForce GTX 960 Strix 2GB GDDR5 OC Edition, instead of a reference one from NVIDIA, it's because the mid-range series are given more leeway for partners to tweak their products. As such, a "reference GeForce GTX 960" may not give you the expectations of what's in the retail channel and NVIDIA has tasked its partners to send over their wares to relevant publications. Fortunately, ASUS is one of the earliest to send over their take of the GeForce GTX 960 to us and we'll be using it as our base comparison model of what you can expect out of the new GPU SKU.

The GeForce GTX 960 has a new GM206 GPU that is based on the same Maxwell architecture, like the earlier and more powerful GTX 980 and GTX 970 cards. Let's take a closer look at this new GPU.

GM206: The newest kid on the block

According to NVIDIA, the GM206 GPU features "all the key architectural innovations" that were first introduced with the GeForce GTX 980. In essence, the Maxwell second generation architecture features a re-designed Streaming Multiprocessor (SMM) that touts efficiency on two fronts; power consumption and instructions processing. As a result, NVIDIA claims that the delivered performance per CUDA core has been improved by as much as 40% against previous-generation Kepler GK104 GPU.

Speaking of CUDA cores, the Maxwell Streaming Multiprocessor (SMM) has housed them, and their accompanying components, in a quadrant design. There are 32 CUDA cores in each quadrant processing block along with its own dedicated warp scheduler. This translates to the SMM having a total of 128 CUDA cores along with eight texture units, Polymorph engine 3 and 96KB of shared memory that is in addition to its 48KB of texture/L1 cache. If you are curious, the stats and the genetics of the SMM are identical to the GTX 980's SMM block in its GM204 GPU. So there's nothing new here.

The GM206 GPU has a total of 8 SMM units for a total of 1024 CUDA cores, spread across to two Graphics Processing Clusters (GPCs). This is exactly half the processing power of the GM204 GPU used in the GTX 980 which boasts four GPC units with a total of 2048 CUDA cores. Since each GPC is accompanied by a 64-bit memory controller bus, the reduction would mean the GeForce GTX 960 will only have a 128-bit wide graphics memory bus. 

The so-called 'reference' GeForce GTX 960 is rated to perform at a base clock speed of 1126MHz, and a boost clock of 1178MHz. Its 2GB of GDDR5 memory modules have a clock speed of 7010MHz, with a total memory bandwidth of 112.16GB/s. Will the Maxwell architecture still shine in its reduced form that is the GM206? We'll soon find out.

Have a look at the table below to see how the GeForce GTX 960's specifications compare against the competition. Take note for our performance preview of the GeForce GTX 960 in the later page, we're actually using the ASUS GeForce GTX 960 Strix 2GB GDDR5 OC Edition. As such, its core and memory are clocked roughly 100MHz and 200MHz more (respectively) than a standard non overclocked counterpart.

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Beyond raw specs of the GM206, it is capable of supporting the new technology fronts made possible by the Maxwell second generation architecture improvements. They are Dynamic Super Resolution (DSR), Multi-Pixel Programmable Sampling with Multi-Frame Sampled AA (MFAA), Voxel Global Illumination (VXGI), and VR Direct. Some promise to deliver better gaming experiences due to more realistic visuals while others focus on performance gains. For example, MFAA can net you higher visual quality at a lower performance overhead or you can trade quality for higher performance.

The GTX 960 is also positioned as an Ultra 4K HD gaming card, just like the GTX 980 and GTX 970. But due to its low power envelope and reduced horsepower, the card is more ideal to double up as a component in a HTPC machine where high resolution output and some gaming caliber is necessary while maintaining a smaller form factor. Many add-in card partners offer custom cooling solutions where the fans turn off when the GPU temperature falls below a certain threshold. Such passive cooling measures translate to quiet operation; another feather in its hat as a HTPC discrete graphics component. In terms of video connectivity options, the card has three DisplayPorts, one HDMI interface and a dual-link DVI-I port.

To reiterate, the GeForce GTX 960 is aimed at the mass market graphics segment and its performance isn't the same as the top-end GTX 900 cards. At US$199, this is NVIDIA's new "sweet spot" graphics card to replace the GTX 760 whose original launch price was US$249 and has been further revised to US$219 when the GTX 980 debuted. 

Test Setup

** Updated on 28th Jan 2015 - We've now included the Radeon R9 280 graphics card as part of our test mix.

These are the specifications of our graphics testbed:

• Intel Core i7-3960X (3.3GHz)
• ASUS P9X79 Pro (Intel X79 chipset) Motherboard
• 4 x 2GB DDR3-1600 G.Skill Ripjaws Memory
• Seagate 7200.10 200GB SATA hard drive (OS)
• Western Digital Caviar Black 7200 RPM 1TB SATA hard drive (Benchmarks + Games)
• Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 64-bit

Below is the list of cards that we lined up for comparison:-. 

• ASUS GeForce GTX 960 Strix 2GB GDDR5 (ForceWare 347.25)
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 2GB GDDR5 (ForceWare 347.09)
• ASUS R9 280 Strix 3GB GDDR55 (AMD Catalyst 14.12)
• Sapphire Radeon R9 270X Vapor-X 2GB GDDR55 (AMD Catalyst 14.12) 

The ASUS Strix GeForce GTX 960 was the card provided for our GTX 960 testing and it was tested at its rated clock speeds, which is a little faster than a reference GTX 960, but it should be more representative of the various overclocked GTX 960 graphics cards that will be populating the market. Take note that the ASUS Strix GeForce GTX 960 graphics card has a default boost clock of 1291MHz. It can however go up to 1317MHz if you install the ASUS GPU Tweak utility and set the graphics card to "OC game mode". For this article, we've left the ASUS card to operate in its default mode.

Naturally, we also included the Kepler-based GTX 760 for comparison as the incoming GTX 960 is its direct replacement. We also compared the new NVIDIA GPU against its closest AMD competitor, the Radeon R9 270X. If you take a close look at the GPU comparison table shown earlier, you would realize that the technical specifications of the Radeon R9 270X has the closest match to the GeForce GTX 960. This would make a great comparison from a technical point of view on where both these cards stack up. It is also the fastest card from AMD that officially works off just one 6-pin PCIe power input, just like the GTX 960. From a cost point of view, the reference Radeon R9 270X was initially launched for US$199 and the retail models are currently still being sold at a similar price point between US$179 to US$229. The representative test card for this class is the Sapphire Radeon R9 270X Vapor-X 2GB GDDR5, which we've tested at its rated clock speed.

Of course, you might also argue that the Radeon R9 280 is a better specced option at the same US retail price range that the R9 270X sells for, but we've run out of these cards for comparison during this article but we'll update it within the next few days once we get a unit and get the latest test results. For this, we've enrolled the ASUS R9 280 Strix graphics card, which is about 50MHz and 200MHz faster at the core and memory clocks over the reference Radeon R9 280. Then there's also an updated lateral variant of the R9 280 which is the Tonga GPU based R9 285 - but it goes at a much higher retail price bracket of US$220 to US$260, so we'll leave that out of direct comparison for the moment. For now, the Radeon R9 270X is still a decent competitive product.

Benchmarks

Here's the full list of benchmarks that we'll be using for our assessment:-

• Futuremark 3DMark 2013
• Crysis 3
• Call of Duty: Ghosts
• Thief
• Hitman: Absolution

For our temperature, power consumption and overclocking testing, 3DMark 2013 was used.

** Updated on 28th Jan 2015 - We've updated the article to include performance figures of a ASUS Radeon R9 280 graphics card. The respective test results segment now have added comments to remark on this card's performance against the ASUS GeForce GTX 960.

3DMark 2013 Results

We updated the 3DMark (2013) benchmark so that it now includes the latest Fire Strike Ultra on top of the existing two tests; Fire Strike and Fire Strike Extreme. This benchmarking suite puts graphics cards through their paces, with extreme levels of tessellation and volumetric illumination, as well as complex smoke simulation using compute shaders and dynamic particle illumination.

The new ASUS Strix GeForce GTX 960 was about 25% better than its older counterpart and the R9 270X for the usual two tests, but take note that we've compared a non-overclocked GeForce GTX 760; had it been overclocked, the differential would still have been a 20% gap in favor of the GTX 960. Against the R9 280, the GTX 960 was just on par with it.

However, for the more taxing Fire Strike Ultra test, the tables switched, with the AMD Radeon R9 270X leading the newcomer by a 20% margin over the GTX 960. The results were even more in favor of the red camp when you notice that the Radeon R9 280 was more than twice as fast as the GTX 960. Looks like the narrower bandwidth of the GTX 960 card wasn't sufficient for 4K content rendered during the Fire Strike Ultra test. The real-world gaming benchmarks in the following few tests will give us a better gauge of the newcomer's performance.

Crysis 3 Results

For this benchmark test setup, we used the Fraps utility to measure the average frame rates churned out by each card at a stipulated rendered cutscene from Crysis 3. The game itself is driven by the CryEngine 3, with extreme amounts of tessellation, per-pixel per-object motion blur, Bokeh, Depth of Field, displacement mapping on small terrain, particle and volumetric lighting and fog shadows, improved dynamic cloth and vegetation, dynamic caustics and diffuse shadows.

The ASUS GeForce GTX 960 pulled ahead of the pack but all cards started to falter when we bumped up gaming settings, in particular, the anti-aliasing effects to 8x. However, all is not rosy here. If you take a look at how the overclocked GeForce GTX 760 cards fare from your shootout in 2013, it seems like there's no performance improvement from the GTX 960. We hope this is just a limitation of the early driver revisions and not the end potential of the GPU.

Thief Results

Published by Eidos Montreal, the PC game Thief was built on a modified version of Unreal Engine 3. From our previous experience, AMD R9 series cards generally have a strong showing for this test and it's clearly the case here again with the Radeon R9 280 leading the pack. Even at high presets, both GeForce GTX 960 and the Radeon R9 270X managed to churn out average recorded frame rates above 40, at the resolution of 1,920 x 1,200 pixels. Again, while the results seem positive for the GTX 960, bear in mind that we're looking at figures from an overclocked GTX 960 such as the ASUS Strix OC edition. If overclocked GeForce GTX 760 cards were factored in this comparison, the gains made by the ASUS GeForce GTX 960 would probably halve.

Call of Duty: Ghosts Results

Our latest gaming benchmark features the IW6 engine, which has been updated from the one that powered the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. The newer game title supports NVIDIA's exclusive technologies like TXAA anti-aliasing, 3D Vision, SLI and PhysX. At mid-level game settings of 4x MSAA, with a resolution of 1,920 x 1,200 pixels, the GTX 960 and AMD Radeon R9 280 were still grooving to the same beat. The Radeon R9 270X was not far behind at all and you literally can't tell them apart during gameplay. Once more, the gains made by the GTX 960 over the GTX 760 are small. This is certainly not what we've been expecting from a next-gen. mainstream card.

Hitman: Absolution Results

We like crowds, especially if you are referring to the 1,200 NPCs that The Hitman: Absolution game title is capable of rendering simultaneously, courtesy of its IO Interactive's proprietary Glacier2 engine. Besides the massive crowd of NPCs, it also features Reflective Shadow Mapping (RSM), Direct Compute accelerated Bokeh Depth of Field, extreme tessellation and Ambient Occlusion.

Just like their performances on the Crysis test, almost all the cards all faltered at high game settings. The Radeon R9 280 however, managed decently.

Temperature

Our "reference" GTX 760 was actually a Palit branded card and despite sporting a custom cooler, the Palit GTX 760 card registered a temperature of 62 degrees Celsius. The ASUS Strix GTX 960 OC Edition was second lowest, with its operating temperature of 59 degrees Celsius and is a decent showing. Naturally, the ASUS R9 280 Strix graphics card recorded higher temperatures because it was using an older, high-end Tahiti variant core (the same used on the Radon HD 7950).

Power Consumption

The ASUS GTX 960 has a power consumption profile similar to the Sapphire R9 270X. This is quite interesting when in fact the GeForce GTX 960 graphics card has an official rated TDP of 120W, whereas the old Radeon R9 270X is rated for 180W TDP. Despite this wide gulf, both had similar power draw while gaming. One would probably expect the GTX 960 to be even more power efficient, but it's unfortunately not the case from our testing. Even from a performance per watt perspective, the GTX 960 doesn't really pull ahead much given the benchmark performance from the previous page.

Again, you can see the ASUS R9 280 pulling in higher figures and this time it's higher power consumption. Consuming up to 20% more power during gaming sessions, once more, the culprit is its older high-end Tahiti GPU core. However, it does trade more power for better results as you've seen from the performance figures on the earlier page.

Overclocking

We managed to overclock the ASUS Strix GeForce GTX 960 card to a high of 1392MHz, which was a gain of 11% over its Gaming base clock of 1253MHz. This translated to a performance gain of about 8% and this is comparable with the GTX 760. Given the low thermal envelope of 120W of the GM206, we actually expected better performance gains. Only for the Fire Strike Ultra tests were the performance gains from overclocking more pronounced, both NVIDIA GeForce GTX cards managed to improve their scores by about 20%, but still lost out to the Radeon R9 270X without overclocking. Take note that we were unable to obtain updated overclocking results for our Sapphire Radeon R9 270X card due to technical issues. Meanwhile, the similarly priced ASUS R9 280 Strix graphics card managed to pull ahead of all the compared cards in this overclocking test.

Conclusion

The GeForce GTX 960 had a promising start especially when you consider that the Maxell architecture was designed with efficiency in mind. And this was true for the GM204 GPU when we pegged the GeForce GTX 980 against the GeForce GTX 780 Ti. We didn't see notable performance gains, but we did experience appreciable performance-per-watt gain and the new features that the GPU brought along with it.

However, trawling through our results obtained with the ASUS Strix GeForce GTX 960 card, which is already overclocked from the reference model, we can hardly build a case for the new GeForce GTX 960 GPU. Apart from the rosy 3DMark results, all other tests yielded marginal gains. Not even in terms of efficiency. Certainly, the GeForce GTX 960 is a fine replacement for the GTX 760 with new features, being DirectX 12 compliant and more, but it fails to entice any previous GeForce GTX 760 owner to upgrade and will only appeal to the exact same audience for whom the GTX 760 targeted at - owners of GeForce GTX 660 and older mid-range graphics cards.

From a price point perspective, the new GeForce GTX 960 has a base recommended price of US$199, which is lower than the GTX 760 is currently going for. Perhaps the price positioning was a sign for us to beware of its performance capabilities. Overclocked cards like the ASUS Strix GeForce GTX 960 will likely retail for US$209 to US$219 price range.

Locally, we expect GeForce GTX 960 cards to range between S$350 to S$390 - the exact same price range that you would currently find most GeForce GTX 760 cards. In fact, the ASUS Strix GeForce GTX 960 2GB OC Edition will retail for S$369. That's quite a big price discrepancy from US prices. For about the same price or just a little less, you can actually get an ASUS Radeon R9 280 graphics card with 3GB of RAM and a beefier GPU. And going by the performance of the GTX 960, you could even consider getting a Radeon R9 270X for a little over S$300 and save a lot more.

From a performance standpoint, we're not quite convinced of the GeForce GTX 960's proposition and it will only appeal to buyers who were initially thinking of getting a GTX 760. It's just unfortunate that we aren't seeing any gains over graphics cards launched in 2013. Then again, could this be a case of yet again another lousy driver provided by NVIDIA? We'll find out soon enough as further updates roll out over the next few days and weeks.

However all is not lost. Compared to its predecessors like the GTX 660 and GTX 760 that lack support for HDMI 2.0, the GTX 960's updated feature make it ideal for a modern HTPC as it can drive 4K displays and TVs and that could be one compelling factor to choose this over older graphics cards (the AMD Radeon R9 270X isn't an upgrade option either if your sights are set on 4K). Of course, the GeForce GTX 960 isn't built to game at 4K resolution (although the marketing will say otherwise), you could use it to enjoy 4K video content on a 4K screen and then tone it down for gaming at a lower resolution, but apply MFAA to at least bump up the detail levels to deliver better than standard 1080p resolution. From a 10-feet viewing distance, it can easily pass off as a decent gaming experience and this is the only true trump card that we would say the GTX 960 has currently over the GTX 760.

This review is just the tip of the iceberg as the mass appeal of the GeForce GTX 960 will certainly see a slew of cards from many add-in card partners of NVIDIA. So do watch this space as we prepare for a round-up of from the commonly contested players and an update of this article with Radeon R9 280 comparisons.

Updated on 28th Jan 2015:-

Will it hold up against the Radeon R9 280 / 285?

After giving the ASUS R9 280 Strix graphics card a spin, we can easily conclude that it's an overall better graphics card given the same price point that it matches up against the ASUS Strix GeForce GTX 960. While the Strix edition of the Radeon R9 280 isn't available locally, you'll find the ASUS Radeon R9 280 DirectCU II that has the same technical specs as the Strix edition card, minus the differing cooler. Going for about S$350 to S$360, it's similarly priced to the S$369 Strix GeForce GTX 960.

Of course the Radeon R9 280 is an older GPU with higher operating temperatures and power draw, but you get slightly better performance out of it as well for the same price point. This is not even considering the even newer Radeon R9 285 counterpart that's available from selective add-in board partners. At almost no extra cost, the newer Tonga GPU core based Radeon R9 285 is more efficient and will better match up to the just announced GeForce GTX 960 where efficiency is concerned and yet deliver more performance.

So why would you consider the GeForce GTX 960? To put it plainly, a more updated GPU with a boatload of new features. Among the new features, MFAA is the most useful to level up image quality at no extra performance cost. The other is DSR, but that's only useful if your game is actually giving you very high frame rates. DirectX 12 hardware support is yet another plus point for future-proofing although it has little relevance for this year where game content is concerned. Lastly, if you intend to use it drive 4K TVs, it has HDMI 2.0 support. Clearly the GeForce GTX 960 is more modern, but the benefits it brings with are not exactly appreciable for everyone at the get-go.

So if you have about S$350 now and you want to obtain the best game performance today, you should consider the Radeon R9 280 or R9 285 graphics card. If you value the newer features and capabilities of the GeForce GTX 960, some of which may not be realizable today, then you can consider it.

What if you wanted to most value for money option? You should actually consider an overlcocked Radeon R9 270X because its performance can still closely match a GeForce GTX 960 graphics card and it doesn't cost a lot more than S$300. The differential in frame rates between them is hardly noticeable and you get a card that's as efficient as the newcomer where power and temperature is concerned.

All things considered, the GeForce GTX 960 is a lateral upgrade from a GTX 760 - you get new capabilities, but it doesn't improve upon raw horsepower for the same price. And given the various other AMD graphics card variants for consideration, no less than three GPU SKUs, you're actually spoiled for choice on the red camp that actually provide more tangible benefits that appeal to a wider group of users.

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