Gtx 960 benchmarks: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 — NotebookCheck.net Tech

GeForce GTX 960 [in 12 benchmarks]

NVIDIA
GeForce GTX 960

Buy

Interface PCIe 3.0 x16

Core clock speed 1127

Max video memory 2 GB

Memory type GDDR5

Memory clock speed 7.0 Gbps

Maximum resolution

Summary

NVIDIA started GeForce GTX 960 sales 22 January 2015 at a recommended price of $199. This is Maxwell architecture desktop card based on 28 nm manufacturing process and primarily aimed at gamers. 2 GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 7.0 GB/s are supplied, and together with 128 Bit memory interface this creates a bandwidth of 112 GB/s.

Compatibility-wise, this is dual-width card attached via PCIe 3.0 x16 interface. Its manufacturer default version has a length of 9.5″ (24.1 cm). 1x 6-pins power connector is required, and power consumption is at 120 Watt.

It provides poor gaming and benchmark performance at

20.41%

of a leader’s which is NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti.

GeForce GTX
960

GeForce RTX
3090 Ti

General info

Of GeForce GTX 960’s architecture, market segment and release date.

Place in performance rating	245
Place by popularity	37
Value for money	9.48
Architecture	Maxwell (2014−2018)
GPU code name	GM206
Market segment	Desktop
Release date	22 January 2015 (7 years ago)
Launch price (MSRP)	$199
Current price	$85 (0. 4x MSRP)	of 49999 (A100 SXM4)

Value for money

To get the index we compare the characteristics of video cards and their relative prices.

Technical specs

GeForce GTX 960’s general performance parameters such as number of shaders, GPU base clock, manufacturing process, texturing and calculation speed. These parameters indirectly speak of GeForce GTX 960’s performance, but for precise assessment you have to consider its benchmark and gaming test results.

Pipelines / CUDA cores	1024	of 18432 (AD102)
CUDA cores	1024
Core clock speed	1127 MHz	of 2610 (Radeon RX 6500 XT)
Boost clock speed	1178 MHz	of 2903 (Radeon Pro W6600)
Number of transistors	2,940 million	of 14400 (GeForce GTX 1080 SLI Mobile)
Manufacturing process technology	28 nm	of 4 (GeForce RTX 4080 Ti)
Thermal design power (TDP)	120 Watt	of 900 (Tesla S2050)
Texture fill rate	72 billion/sec	of 939. 8 (h200 SXM5)
Floating-point performance	2,413 gflops	of 16384 (Radeon Pro Duo)

Compatibility, dimensions and requirements

Information on GeForce GTX 960’s compatibility with other computer components. Useful when choosing a future computer configuration or upgrading an existing one. For desktop video cards it’s interface and bus (motherboard compatibility), additional power connectors (power supply compatibility).

Bus support	PCI Express 3.0
Interface	PCIe 3.0 x16
Length	9.5″ (24.1 cm)
Height	4.376″ (11.1 cm)
Width	2-slot
Recommended system power (PSU)	400 Watt
Supplementary power connectors	1x 6-pins
SLI options	+

Memory

Parameters of memory installed on GeForce GTX 960: its type, size, bus, clock and resulting bandwidth. Note that GPUs integrated into processors don’t have dedicated memory and use a shared part of system RAM.

Memory type	GDDR5
Maximum RAM amount	2 GB	of 128 (Radeon Instinct MI250X)
Memory bus width	128 Bit	of 8192 (Radeon Instinct MI250X)
Memory clock speed	7.0 GB/s	of 21000 (GeForce RTX 3090 Ti)
Memory bandwidth	112 GB/s	of 14400 (Radeon R7 M260)
Shared memory	—

Video outputs and ports

Types and number of video connectors present on GeForce GTX 960. As a rule, this section is relevant only for desktop reference video cards, since for notebook ones the availability of certain video outputs depends on the laptop model.

Display Connectors	Dual Link DVI-I, HDMI 2. 0, 3x DisplayPort 1.2
Multi monitor support	4 displays
HDMI	+
HDCP	+
Maximum VGA resolution	2048×1536
G-SYNC support	+
Audio input for HDMI	Internal

Technologies

Technological solutions and APIs supported by GeForce GTX 960. You’ll probably need this information if you need some particular technology for your purposes.

GameStream	+
GeForce ShadowPlay	+
GPU Boost	2.0
GameWorks	+

API support

APIs supported by GeForce GTX 960, sometimes including their particular versions.

DirectX	12 (12_1)
Shader Model	6.4
OpenGL	4.4	of 4.6 (GeForce GTX 1080 Mobile)
OpenCL	1.2
Vulkan	+
CUDA	+

Benchmark performance

Non-gaming benchmark performance of GeForce GTX 960. Note that overall benchmark performance is measured in points in 0-100 range.

Overall score

This is our combined benchmark performance rating. We are regularly improving our combining algorithms, but if you find some perceived inconsistencies, feel free to speak up in comments section, we usually fix problems quickly.

GTX 960
20.41

Passmark

3DMark 11 Performance GPU

3DMark Vantage Performance

3DMark Cloud Gate GPU

3DMark Fire Strike Score

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics

GeekBench 5 OpenCL

3DMark Ice Storm GPU

GeekBench 5 Vulkan

GeekBench 5 CUDA

Octane Render OctaneBench

Unigine Heaven 4. 0

Passmark

This is probably the most ubiquitous benchmark, part of Passmark PerformanceTest suite. It gives the graphics card a thorough evaluation under various load, providing four separate benchmarks for Direct3D versions 9, 10, 11 and 12 (the last being done in 4K resolution if possible), and few more tests engaging DirectCompute capabilities.

Benchmark coverage: 26%

GTX 960
6030

3DMark 11 Performance GPU

3DMark 11 is an obsolete DirectX 11 benchmark by Futuremark. It used four tests based on two scenes, one being few submarines exploring the submerged wreck of a sunken ship, the other is an abandoned temple deep in the jungle. All the tests are heavy with volumetric lighting and tessellation, and despite being done in 1280×720 resolution, are relatively taxing. Discontinued in January 2020, 3DMark 11 is now superseded by Time Spy.

Benchmark coverage: 17%

GTX 960
10768

3DMark Vantage Performance

3DMark Vantage is an outdated DirectX 10 benchmark using 1280×1024 screen resolution. It taxes the graphics card with two scenes, one depicting a girl escaping some militarized base located within a sea cave, the other displaying a space fleet attack on a defenseless planet. It was discontinued in April 2017, and Time Spy benchmark is now recommended to be used instead.

Benchmark coverage: 17%

GTX 960
30751

3DMark Cloud Gate GPU

Cloud Gate is an outdated DirectX 11 feature level 10 benchmark that was used for home PCs and basic notebooks. It displays a few scenes of some weird space teleportation device launching spaceships into unknown, using fixed resolution of 1280×720. Just like Ice Storm benchmark, it has been discontinued in January 2020 and replaced by 3DMark Night Raid.

Benchmark coverage: 14%

GTX 960
49918

3DMark Fire Strike Score

Benchmark coverage: 14%

GTX 960
6699

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics

Fire Strike is a DirectX 11 benchmark for gaming PCs. It features two separate tests displaying a fight between a humanoid and a fiery creature seemingly made of lava. Using 1920×1080 resolution, Fire Strike shows off some realistic enough graphics and is quite taxing on hardware.

Benchmark coverage: 14%

GTX 960
7916

GeekBench 5 OpenCL

Geekbench 5 is a widespread graphics card benchmark combined from 11 different test scenarios. All these scenarios rely on direct usage of GPU’s processing power, no 3D rendering is involved. This variation uses OpenCL API by Khronos Group.

Benchmark coverage: 9%

GTX 960
20858

3DMark Ice Storm GPU

Ice Storm Graphics is an obsolete benchmark, part of 3DMark suite. Ice Storm was used to measure entry level laptops and Windows-based tablets performance. It utilizes DirectX 11 feature level 9 to display a battle between two space fleets near a frozen planet in 1280×720 resolution. Discontinued in January 2020, it is now superseded by 3DMark Night Raid.

Benchmark coverage: 8%

GTX 960
310860

GeekBench 5 Vulkan

Benchmark coverage: 5%

GTX 960
22233

GeekBench 5 CUDA

Benchmark coverage: 5%

GTX 960
17784

Octane Render OctaneBench

This is a special benchmark measuring graphics card performance in OctaneRender, which is a realistic GPU rendering engine by OTOY Inc. , available either as a standalone program, or as a plugin for 3DS Max, Cinema 4D and many other apps. It renders four different static scenes, then compares render times with a reference GPU which is currently GeForce GTX 980. This benchmark has nothing to do with gaming and is aimed at professional 3D graphics artists.

Benchmark coverage: 4%

GTX 960
48

Unigine Heaven 4.0

This is an old DirectX 11 benchmark, a newer version of Unigine 3.0 with relatively small differences. It displays a fantasy medieval town sprawling over several flying islands. The benchmark is still sometimes used, despite its significant age, as it was released back in 2013.

Benchmark coverage: 1%

GTX 960
866

Mining hashrates

Cryptocurrency mining performance of GeForce GTX 960. Usually measured in megahashes per second.

Bitcoin / BTC (SHA256)	318 Mh/s
Decred / DCR (Decred)	0. 92 Gh/s
Ethereum / ETH (DaggerHashimoto)	8 Mh/s
Monero / XMR (CryptoNight)	0.27 kh/s
Zcash / ZEC (Equihash)	141.47 Sol/s

Game benchmarks

Let’s see how good GeForce GTX 960 is for gaming. Particular gaming benchmark results are measured in frames per second. Comparisons with game system requirements are included, but remember that sometimes official requirements may reflect reality inaccurately.

Average FPS

Here are the average frames per second in a large set of popular modern games across different resolutions:

Full HD	66
4K	29

Popular games

Full HD
Low Preset

Full HD
Medium Preset

Full HD
High Preset

Full HD
Ultra Preset

1440p
High Preset

1440p
Ultra Preset

4K
High Preset

4K
Ultra Preset

Cyberpunk 2077

20−22

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey	20−22
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla	20−22
Battlefield 5	20−22
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare	20−22
Cyberpunk 2077	20−22
Far Cry 5	20−22
Far Cry New Dawn	20−22
Forza Horizon 4	20−22
Hitman 3	20−22
Horizon Zero Dawn	20−22
Red Dead Redemption 2	20−22
Shadow of the Tomb Raider	20−22
Watch Dogs: Legion	20−22

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey	20−22
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla	20−22
Battlefield 5	20−22
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare	20−22
Cyberpunk 2077	20−22
Far Cry 5	20−22
Far Cry New Dawn	20−22
Forza Horizon 4	20−22
Hitman 3	20−22
Horizon Zero Dawn	20−22
Metro Exodus	20−22
Red Dead Redemption 2	20−22
Shadow of the Tomb Raider	20−22
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt	50
Watch Dogs: Legion	20−22

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey	20−22
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla	20−22
Battlefield 5	20−22
Cyberpunk 2077	20−22
Far Cry 5	20−22
Far Cry New Dawn	20−22
Forza Horizon 4	20−22
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt	28
Watch Dogs: Legion	20−22

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare	20−22
Hitman 3	20−22
Horizon Zero Dawn	20−22
Metro Exodus	20−22
Red Dead Redemption 2	20−22
Shadow of the Tomb Raider	20−22

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey	20−22
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla	20−22
Battlefield 5	20−22
Cyberpunk 2077	20−22
Far Cry 5	20−22
Far Cry New Dawn	20−22
Forza Horizon 4	20−22
Watch Dogs: Legion	20−22

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare	20−22
Hitman 3	20−22
Horizon Zero Dawn	20−22
Metro Exodus	20−22
Red Dead Redemption 2	20−22
Shadow of the Tomb Raider	20−22
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt	20−22

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey	20−22
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla	20−22
Battlefield 5	20−22
Cyberpunk 2077	20−22
Far Cry 5	20−22
Far Cry New Dawn	20−22
Forza Horizon 4	20−22
Watch Dogs: Legion	20−22

Relative perfomance

Overall GeForce GTX 960 performance compared to nearest competitors among desktop video cards.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti
104.51

AMD Radeon R9 380
103.77

AMD Radeon R9 380X
102.89

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960
100

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770
97.45

AMD Radeon R9 280X
96.82

AMD Radeon R9 280
93.73

AMD equivalent

The nearest GeForce GTX 960’s AMD equivalent is Radeon R9 380X, which is faster by 3% and higher by 6 positions in our rating.

Radeon R9
380X

Compare

Here are some closest AMD rivals to GeForce GTX 960:

AMD Radeon R9 285
110. 78

AMD Radeon R9 380
103.77

AMD Radeon R9 380X
102.89

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960
100

AMD Radeon R9 280X
96.82

AMD Radeon R9 280
93.73

AMD Radeon HD 7990
92.26

Similar GPUs

Here is our recommendation of several graphics cards that are more or less close in performance to the one reviewed.

Radeon R9
280X

Compare

Radeon R9
380

Compare

GeForce GTX
1050 Ti

Compare

GeForce GTX
680

Compare

GeForce GTX
950

Compare

Radeon RX
570

Compare

Recommended processors

These processors are most commonly used with GeForce GTX 960 according to our statistics.

Core i5
4460

5.6%

Core i5
6400

2.3%

Core i5
3470

2.2%

FX
6300

2.2%

Core i3
10100F

1.7%

Core i5
6500

1.6%

Core i7
3770

1.5%

Xeon E5
2620 v3

1. 5%

Core i5
2400

1.5%

Xeon E5
2689

1.3%

User rating

Here you can see the user rating of the graphics card, as well as rate it yourself.

Questions and comments

Here you can ask a question about GeForce GTX 960, agree or disagree with our judgements, or report an error or mismatch.

Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.

Nvidia GTX 960 review | Digital Trends

DT Recommended Product

“The GTX 960 is an excellent budget video card for gamers with a 1080p display.”

Pros

Silent at idle
Low power draw
Can easily handle most games at 1080p
Good value

Cons

Modest memory bandwidth
1440p and 4K can prove too much

The number 60 has developed a special meaning in Nvidia’s product line over the last five years. While its high-end flagships push the boundaries of performance, its mid-range GPUs, like the much-loved GTX 660, are the chips most gamers actually buy. It’s currently the most popular family of video cards in Steam’s hardware survey, and the card most frequently used by fans of the multiplayer-online-battle-arena (MOBA) genre.

Yet it’s been awhile since we’ve seen an update. GTX 760 reviews hit the web in June of 2013, over a year and a half ago, with the card shipping in volume over the following month. Gamers have waited, and waited, and waited for a successor. Now, with the GTX 960, it’s finally here.

The GTX 960 is about 40 percent slower than the 980, but well less than half the price.

What Nvidia hopes to accomplish with this card is clear: The GTX 960 is built to be everything an average gamer will need. It may not run every game at the absolute highest settings, but it should handle most games at 1080p and a step off maximum detail – in theory, at least.

The formula of affordable performance has been Nvidia’s key to success in the past, but it’s never been easy to implement. Balancing speed, price and efficiency is tricky, and even a minor flub can send a card like this into the abyss of missed expectations.

Midsized Maxwell

The GTX 960 uses the same Maxwell architecture as the GTX 980 and 970 but, as you might expect, it’s been altered to craft a GPU that better suites the 960’s mission.

Nvidia calls the chip “GM206.” It has eight streaming multiprocessors, each of which contains 128 CUDA cores, for a total of 1,024. That’s roughly half the GTX 980, which provides a good idea of where this new card stands compared to the flagship. The GTX 960 is not just a minor step-down from the cream of the crop, but instead a dramatic revision that cuts back in several key areas.

Still, Nvidia says it has extracted maximum grunt from the cores available. Per-core performance is up almost 40 percent compared to Kepler, the architecture used in the 700 series chips, and performance per watt has doubled.

Few gamers will have reason to quarrel with the GPU. They may have a complaint about the memory, however, which is a meager 128-bit pipe paired with 2GB of GDDR5.

That works out to 148.8 gigabytes of bandwidth per second, which is about 100 gigabytes per second behind the GTX 980, and only a minor improvement over the GTX 660 (which Nvidia quotes at 144.2GB/s). Such a tiny bump is surprising; the GTX 660 was released almost three years ago and the memory demands of games have increased since then.

Bill Roberson/Digital Trends

Nvidia has tossed in hardware encode and decode support for H.265 alongside HDCP 2.2 compatibility over HDMI 2.0. This is an important advancement for anyone interested in home theater, as it means a PC with the GTX 960 will be ready to handle current and upcoming 4K content and output it to an HDTV.

And then there’s the green team’s usual suite of software utilities, which includes GeForce Experience for driver updates, ShadowPlay for gaming recording and G-Sync for a stutter-free experience on compatible monitors. There’s also Dynamic Super Resolution, a new feature introduced with the 900 series that can improve the quality of older titles by rendering at a very high resolution and then down-scaling the result with a special filter. DirectX 12 support is included, too.

Big Boy

A typical GTX 960 occupies two slots, like almost every modern PCI Express video card, and measures about nine and a half inches long. The EVGA card we reviewed, which has a custom cooler, is 10 inches. The size of the reference card is identical to the GTX 760, which itself was identical to the GTX 660.

Memory bandwidth is barely more than a stock GTX 660, which is several years old.

Only a single PCI Express power connector is needed to power the GTX 960, as with previous cards in the family, and Nvidia’s specifications call for a surprisingly small 400-watt power supply. The out-going GTX 760 called for a 500-watt supply and the GTX 660 called for a 450-watt unit.

Nvidia boasted during its presentation that the GTX 960 can run League of Legends at 1080p while consuming only 30 watts, and under that workload the card can be passively cooled. That’s pretty good, but it’s apparently not enough for OEMs, which are as usual putting together their own designs.

EVGA’s custom cooling solution, which the company calls ACX 2.0, helps the card maintain silent, fanless operation whenever the GPU’s temperature is below 60 degrees Celsius through the use of a large cooling plate that covers the memory. The company also uses a double ball-bearing fan design to prolong life and improve efficiency when the fans are active. The card is not overclocked from the factory, but owners can use EVGA’s PrecisionX software to turn it up to 11.

The performance of silence

We put the cooler to the test and found it delivers a quiet experience. At idle the fans remain off, which of course means the GTX 960 adds no noise to the system. Full load forced the fans on, of course, but even then we measured no more than 38.9 decibels of noise. That’s slightly less than the GTX 980, which was already among the quietest cards we’ve ever reviewed.

To see how the claims of passively cooled gaming stacked up, we turned to Unigine’s Valley benchmark, which we ran at a variety of settings between 720p and 1080p resolution. We also limited the frame rate to 60 FPS. The card was unable to run a full test loop without turning on its fans. While some aging 3D games may play passively, that’s not how the card works with most titles.

Bill Roberson/Digital Trends

We measured power draw of 52 watts at idle, which rose to as much as 228 watts at load. Both figures are not as far off the GTX 980 as you might expect. When we tested that card in the same rig (a Falcon Northwest Talon) we measured idle draw of 58 watts and load draw of up to 250 watts. On the other hand, though, the 960 needs 20 watts less at idle than AMD’s much slower Radeon R7 250X.

Game performance

Now we know where Nvidia intends the GTX 960 to compete, but talk isn’t worth much. Here’s how this new mid-range hardware stacked up in modern titles.

3DMark

Futuremark’s 3DMark is the industry standard among synthetic benchmark tests. It provides a solid, well-rounded look at performance across a variety of loops designed to simulate different workloads, from games so basic they can run on tablets to the most demanding 3D titles. We focus on Cloud Gate and Fire Strike, which simulate modest and extremely intense titles, respectively.

The performance picture here is clear. Nvidia’s GTX 970 trails the flagship 980 by about 20 percent, and the 960 is about 40 percent slower.

That’s a big disadvantage, but it’s not unexpected given the price difference between these cards. A GTX 980 will typically set you back $550, but the 960’s MSRP is just $200. Based on 3DMark alone we’d have to say the GTX 960 is a solid value.

Now what about real-world gaming?

Diablo 3

We started in Diablo 3, a graphically simple game most modern hardware can handle with ease. The GTX 960 is no exception, blazing an impressive path at 1080p. It hit an average of 176 frames per second even at very high detail.

Players with a 1080p monitor will have no complaint, but 4K gaming is rarely smooth.

Such excellent performance is bound to tempt gamers into buying a 4K monitor, and that wouldn’t be a mistake – if this is the only game you enjoy. We measured an average frame rate of exactly 60 FPS with all details at maximum, and the minimum dipped no lower than 49 FPS.

Civilization Beyond Earth

The latest title from strategy developer Firaxis isn’t exactly a looker, but it can be surprisingly demanding. We ran the baked-in benchmark, which simulates a busy end-game situation, and found the GTX 960 managed 70 frames per second at maximum detail and 1080p resolution. The minimum, once again, is a modest 49 FPS.

4K hammered the 960, however, as it hit an average of just 44 FPS even at medium detail with 2x MSAA turned on. Switching to maximum detail slowed the game to a crawl, and we saw an average of just 28 FPS. That’s playable because of the game’s slow pace, but it’s certainly not ideal.

Battlefield 4

DICE’s standout first-person shooter is no longer at the cutting edge of graphics, but it can still be tough for mid-range hardware to run with every bit of eye candy turned on. The GTX 960 once again delivered a good-enough performance, though, hitting 60 FPS at 1080p and Ultra detail. The minimum framerate was 52 FPS.

That, of course, doesn’t leave much leftover grunt of 4K. We measured a playable average of 45 FPS at medium detail, which sunk to an unplayable 17 FPS average at ultra. Clearly, the GTX 960 can’t handle much beyond 1080p in this title.

Shadows of Mordor

This cross-platform game was the surprise treat of 2014, but it’s also extremely hard on hardware, and the GTX 960 isn’t entirely up to the task. While the title averaged 86 frames per second at medium detail, that was cut back to a mere 38 at ultra. Worse, the minimum frame rate came in at 16, which means gameplay can be frustrating at times.
4K? Forget about it. At medium the average was a barely playable 29 FPS. Ultra cut that number down to just 15 FPS, with a minimum of nine. Clearly, this game is too much for the GTX 960 when played at UltraHD resolution.

Crysis 3

Now it’s time for the ultimate test, Crysis 3. While the game is getting on in years it remains one of the most demanding titles available, a reputation it reaffirmed during our benchmarks. Even 1080p and medium detail turned in an average of 57 FPS, and very high reduced that to a stutter-stop 16 FPS. Ouch!

Bill Roberson/Digital Trends

As for 4K, well, you can imagine how it went down. At medium the game hit an average of 24 FPS, which is almost playable, but very high detail was hopeless. The game continually crashed whenever we switched textures to this setting.

Conclusion

Nvidia’s review guide was careful focus on 1080p gaming, and it’s easy to see why. At full HD the card performs well, hitting an average of 60 FPS in most games even with detail set to maximum. Only Crysis 3 proved a real challenge, reporting an average of 57 FPS at medium presets. Up the resolution to 1440p or 4K, however, and there may be problems.

With that said, the GTX 960 does provide a strong boost over the outgoing GTX 760. In 3DMark’s Fire Strike loop, for example, it scores 6,675, over 1,000 better than the 760’s result of 5,393. The GTX 760 also debuted at $250, but the reference 960 is only $200 (and our EVGA review unit is $210). Nvidia’s mid-range entry remains a solid value.

Gamers with a 1080p monitor will find a lot to like. The new GTX 960 is about 20 percent quicker than the outgoing GTX 760, and it provides that boost alongside passive idle operation, minimal noise at load and a more affordable price. This is what most gamers will, and should, buy. Just don’t expect it to handle anything you throw at it.

Highs

Silent at idle
Low power draw
Can easily handle most games at 1080p
Good value

Lows

Modest memory bandwidth
1440p and 4K can prove too much

Editors’ Recommendations

Nvidia addresses the rumors about the RTX 40 GPUs’ power consumption
Three ultra-rare RTX 4090 GPUs are hidden in Cyberpunk 2077
The Aorus RTX 4090 Master is the biggest GPU we’ve ever seen
AMD’s GPU prices are dropping even below list
Nvidia CEO’s response to the EVGA controversy may surprise you

Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 2GB vs 4GB review

We have unfinished business with Nvidia’s GTX 960. On launch, we lauded its power efficiency, overclocking and cutting-edge media acceleration but we had two issues: firstly, there was no clear win over the competition in terms of performance, and secondly, it was a 2GB card in a world where console-level visuals were starting to demand a 3GB minimum. However, in line with its AMD counterpart — the R9 380 — 4GB variants are now available, and we’ve finally acquired one.

The card in question is Gigabyte’s GV-N960OC-4GD and we bought it ourselves from Amazon for £160. And that price-point is significant, because it’s pretty much the same cost as many of the other GTX 960s on the market — cards that only feature the standard 2GB allocation. Which begs the question, is there any sign of obvious cost-cutting on this particular model? Well, the truth is that in direct comparison with our existing 2GB SKU — MSI’s Gaming 2G model — it’s actually a bit of a peach. Physically, the card is much smaller, making it a really good, cheap card for a relatively powerful small form-factor PC, yet there is no obvious increase in heat generation or fan noise. Even on an open air test bed, there’s no sign of the dreaded ‘coil whine’.

Build quality looks good, the card is more understated than many of its competitors, and even with its diminutive dimensions, there’s no real loss of functionality. Gigabyte’s model retains the SLI connectivity, and feature dual DVIs, HDMI and DisplayPort IO — probably more useful for a card in this price range than the three-way DisplayPort, DVI and HDMI set-up of our existing MSI Gaming 2G card.

In terms of power delivery, it uses the GTX 960’s standard six-pin input, making it widely compatible with more power supplies than its AMD equivalent, the R9 380 (typically requiring two). The MSI card has an eight-pin input for higher power delivery, but when it came to overclocking, that really seemed to make no odds. Nvidia reckons that even on a standard cooler, the GTX 960’s fully enabled GM206 processor will overclock nicely, boosting to around 1450MHz. We got the Gigabyte card up to 1475MHz vs 1500MHz on the MSI model — a difference that has no noticeable impact on real-world gaming.

Caption

Attribution

Buy the graphics cards tested on this page from Amazon with free shipping:

Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 2GB
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 960 4GB
AMD Radeon R9 380 2GB
AMD Radeon R9 380 4GB

However, at stock settings, the Gigabyte card is slower than our existing MSI example. Base clock is set at 1190MHz vs 1216MHz, and we suspect that the MSI card has more aggressive boost, resulting in slightly lower frame-rates on our new 4GB card. But there’s really nothing at all to stop you dipping into your overclocking tool of choice (we recommend MSI Afterburner) and upping the core clock by, say, 50MHz and that will more than compensate. In truth, that’s barely scratching the surface of what this card can do from an overclocking perspective.

So on a general level, what kind of performance can you expect from the GTX 960? When we first reviewed it, there was no knockout win in terms of its gaming throughput — and things have changed since then, and arguably, not for the better. AMD has refreshed its R9 285, essentially overclocking it and backing it with improved drivers. The result is the R9 380, which is undoubtedly the faster card.

We like to get a handle on the gaming credentials of any given GPU by running it through the Crysis 3 gameplay challenge — a run-through of the Welcome to the Jungle stage, which on high and very high presets, remains highly demanding. Our aim here is to hit 1080p at as close to a sustained 60fps as possible, matching the resolution and refresh rate of the most common type of gaming display in use today (according to the Steam hardware survey, at least).

In the 1080p Crysis challenge, we aim to hit a consistent 60fps with no tearing. Here we find that the R9 380 is marginally more powerful than the GTX 960, while both surpass the older R9 280.

Crysis 3 1080p60/V-Sync Gameplay	GTX 960	R9 380	R9 280
Lowest Frame-Rate	40fps	41fps	40fps
Dropped Frames (from 18650 total)	689 (3.7%)	539 (2.9%)	840 (4.5%)

Dropping down to the high preset to sustain 60fps as much as we can, we pit the GTX 960 against the R9 380 and our favoured card in this category (before AMD discontinued it) — the R9 280. The results demonstrate that there is the same ballpark performance, but the latest AMD card is better at preserving peak frame-rates. The GTX 960 sits in the middle, faster than the old Radeon but not quite as quick as the latest model.

Now, the R9 380 doesn’t have much in the way of overclocking headroom available (1-3fps extra on seven of our eight test games at 1080p, with Tomb Raider doing best, rising by 5fps), so we were interested in revisiting GTX 960 performance on two counts. Firstly to see if the easily overclockable Nvidia card can catch up or exceed its competitor once the OC was in place, and secondly — and rather more importantly — to see the impact that 4GB of VRAM makes. On the first count, the answer is broadly positive — the GTX 960 either draws level with R9 380, or mildly exceeds it, but there’s no knockout blow against the AMD counterpart. The second point is a little more complex.

The TL;DR read version is this: watch the video. Nvidia’s memory management is typically more robust than its AMD counterpart, meaning that its 2GB tends to go further (look at Far Cry 4 for the best example of this). For the most part, latency spikes (stutter) where VRAM is maxed are smoothed out, producing improved performance that belies the frame-rate averages. However, there is a night and day difference with an ultra-high Assassin’s Creed Unity — there’s a 30 per cent boost to overall performance with a 4GB GTX 960, making the top-end experience attainable at 30fps on what is a relatively inexpensive card. Elsewhere, gains are more limited, if not non-existent. Buying a 4GB card at this point remains an insurance policy of sorts — something that pays off spectacularly occasionally, especially in sub-optimal PC ports (Batman: Arkham Knight, we’re looking at you).

1080p is the most popular gaming resolution — here we run a suite of demanding benchmarks at maximum settings to see what these graphics cards are capable of. Compare the 2GB vs 4GB results on both cards in Far Cry 4 and Assassin’s Creed Unity, especially.

1920×1080 (1080p)	R9 380 2GB	R9 380 4GB	GTX 960 2GB	GTX 960 4GB	GTX 960 4GB OC
Assassin’s Creed Unity, Ultra High, FXAA	32. 8	37.1	26.7	34.5	39.0
Battlefield 4, Ultra, 4x MSAA	47.9	47.8	49.4	47.6	53.6
Crysis 3, Very High, SMAA T2x	50.3	49.8	47.2	46.2	51.6
Far Cry 4, Ultra, SMAA	50.7	53.8	48.1	47.2	53.1
Shadow of Mordor, Ultra, Medium Textures, FXAA	62.7	64.1	52.8	52.2	56.9
Ryse, High, SMAA	47.8	49.5	42.4	41.1	46.5
Tomb Raider, Ultimate, FXAA	69.5	70.0	66.9	65.2	72.5
The Witcher 3, High, No HairWorks, Custom AA	49.7	49.2	47.3	47.2	53.0

We can’t recommend the GTX 960 or the R9 380 for high-end gameplay at 1440p — while most of the numbers below are north of the 30fps threshold, it’s important to remember that they are averages. All of the games tested here with the exception of Shadow of Mordor and Tomb Raider drop into the low-20s at their lowest points — and those are the moments you’ll remember most in your gameplay sessions. Bearing in mind that 2560×1440 represents a 77 per cent increase in resolution over 1080p, you’re going to need some fairly aggressive settings tweaks in the downward direction to get today’s demanding titles to run well at this high pixel count.

Still, the games that tested the 2GB VRAM limit first time around are even more challenging now, but mostly for the R9 380, where even dropping Assassin’s Creed Unity down from ultra high to high settings still results in big wins for AMD’s 4GB card compared to its 2GB version. Once again confirming that Nvidia VRAM goes further, the performance difference is much lower between the two SKUs, though 4GB remains preferable.

Just to reiterate the point, on both tables you’ll note that the 4GB GTX 960 is marginally slower than the 2GB version in most cases. This is not down to the VRAM difference — it’s because of the differing factory overclocks between the 2GB MSI card we had to test and the 4GB Gigabyte card. On aggregate across our eight tests, the 4GB R9 380 is around ten per cent faster than its GTX 960 counterpart, but with the overclock in place, the Nvidia card has an average 1.7 per cent uplift compared to its rival (obviously though, the R9 380 itself can be pushed beyond this, but not substantially). At 1440p, the gap widens — the R9 380 is 15 per cent faster when the 4GB cards are compared directly.

At 1440p, the advantages of 4GB of RAM are more pronounced, with even more stutter on the 2GB R9 380 compared to its 4GB counterpart. The GTX 960 2GB isn’t quite as badly affected as its AMD counterpart, but it is clearly still reaching VRAM limits, with more sustained performance with a 4GB framebuffer.

2560×1440 (1440p)	R9 380 2GB	R9 380 4GB	GTX 960 2GB	GTX 960 4GB
Assassin’s Creed Unity, High, FXAA	27. 3	31.4	25.2	26.2
Battlefield 4, Ultra, 4x MSAA	31.6	31.5	31.9	31.0
Crysis 3, Very High, SMAA T2x	31.6	31.3	28.3	27.7
Far Cry 4, Ultra, SMAA	36.5	39.5	33.7	32.8
Shadow of Mordor, Ultra, Medium Textures, FXAA	46.5	46.3	37.8	36.8
Ryse, High, SMAA	33.0	35.6	30.2	29.2
Tomb Raider, Ultimate, FXAA	47.7	47.7	42.2	41.2
The Witcher 3, High, No HairWorks, Custom AA	33.5	33.2	30.4	31.0

Let’s round off the analysis by taking a look at power consumption and overclocking. We have a particular stress test here: the end of the Crysis 3 Welcome to the Jungle stage features an area of the level rich in geometry and bathed in performance-sapping alpha effects. It causes a spike in power consumption we’ve not seen in a repeatable scenario in any other game. We use this to test peak system power consumption, and also to stress-test our overclocking. The chances are you can push this card further, but we’re interested not just in maximum frequencies but also in longer term stability.

We were stable with an additional 160MHz added to the core and 450MHz to the onboard GDDR5 taking us very close to a full 8000gbps of bandwidth. That’s slightly lower in terms of the core compared to the MSI Gaming 2G model we tested, but had no noticeable impact on everyday gaming — we were still regularly boosting to an impressive 1475MHz. That said, this is lower than other Maxwell cards, where +200MHz to the core is usually our starting point. On average, the Gigabyte GTX 960 added 12 per cent to its performance with the overclock in place, and bearing in mind that the card remained cool and quiet with no massive spike in power draw, that’s a good result.

As expected, it’s good news in terms of overall power consumption — the GTX 960 is considerably more power-efficient than the R9 380, and overclocking adds a mere 22W to consumption. On an open air test-bed, GPU temperatures remained in the 60 degrees Celsius range, even with the card overclocked. Overall consumption in the stress test scenario hit a max of around 248W here. Bearing in mind we’re using a Core i7 4790K processor, that’s not bad at all. And we should say that this Crysis stress test really does put the card through the wringer — in our initial GTX 960 review, we used the Metro Last Light benchmark for power consumption testing and the result was almost 50W lower.

This scene from Crysis 3 is easily repeatable and incurs a heavy, sustained load on the GPU — good for testing overclocks and heavy power draw.

	R9 380 2GB	R9 380 4GB	GTX 960 2GB	GTX 960 4GB	GTX 960 4GB OC
Peak System Power Draw	282W	279W	228W	226W	248W

We originally characterised the GTX 960 as ‘good but not great’ and in performance terms, nothing has changed. Indeed, with the arrival of the R9 380, AMD has inched ahead and even with a boost overclock reaching 1475MHz, the GTX 960 still doesn’t dominate. Performance is king in terms of GPU buying recommendations, but there are scenarios where other factors should be taken into account — which leads us on to why we bought this particular 4GB GTX 960 in the first place.

Eurogamer video team member Ian Higton required an upgrade for his gaming PC running an ‘oldie but goodie’ Core i7 920, overclocked to 3.3GHz. We swapped out the mechanical hard drive for an SSD, and replaced the 1GB Radeon HD 7850 with the Gigabyte GTX 960. Why not the R9 380? Well, it requires two six-pin PSU power inputs. The PC in question has a Corsair CX430 power supply with one six-pin PSU output, meaning that the GTX 960 offered a straight GPU swap with no cable faffing. More importantly, the onboard media block will hook up directly with whatever livestreaming set-up he’s using (and failing that, Nvidia ShadowPlay is very, very good). Performance-wise, he still has GPU power that outstrips the consoles and with 4GB of VRAM, he’s future-proofed as far as we can take him at a sub-£200 price-point. Overall, this package is pretty neat for £160.

It was for those reasons that we took the plunge in buying the card, but once we received it, it’s clear there were plenty more good reasons for considering this product. This GTX 960 is very small — perfect for integration in a small form-factor PC or DIY Steam Machine. Combined with its excellent acoustic performance and hardware h.264/HEVC decode, the Gigabyte GV-N960OC-4GD would work beautifully in an HTPC. In short, this card may not offer all of the performance of its AMD rival (though overclocking helps a lot), but its complete feature set is accomplished, arguably it’s more versatile and — for now at least — it’s cheaper than 4GB versions of the R9 380.

There’ll always be the sense that the GTX 960 isn’t Nvidia’s finest hour. The firm commands performance leadership in virtually every other market sector, and in this sense, the GTX 960 is an outlier. But fundamentally it clearly has its strengths, and the overall package offered by the Gigabyte GV-N960OC-4GD makes the most of the processor’s strongest points in a highly appealing, miniaturised form factor.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 review: GPU specs, performance benchmarks

Buy on Amazon

GeForce GTX 960 videocard released by NVIDIA; release date: 22 January 2015. At the time of release, the videocard cost $199. The videocard is designed for desktop-computers and based on Maxwell 2.0 microarchitecture codenamed GM206.

Core clock speed — 1127 MHz. Boost clock speed — 1178 MHz. Texture fill rate — 72 billion / sec. Pipelines — 1024. Floating-point performance — 2,413 gflops. Manufacturing process technology — 28 nm. Transistors count — 2,940 million. Power consumption (TDP) — 120 Watt.

Memory type: GDDR5. Maximum RAM amount — 2 GB. Memory bus width — 128 Bit. Memory clock speed — 7.0 GB/s. Memory bandwidth — 112 GB / s. Shared memory — 0.

Benchmarks

PassMark
G3D Mark

Top 1 GPU

This GPU

PassMark
G2D Mark

Top 1 GPU

This GPU

Geekbench
OpenCL

Top 1 GPU

This GPU

237214

CompuBench 1.

5 Desktop
Face Detection

Top 1 GPU

This GPU

735.800 mPixels/s

73.733 mPixels/s

CompuBench 1.5 Desktop
Ocean Surface Simulation

Top 1 GPU

This GPU

7585.258 Frames/s

792.440 Frames/s

CompuBench 1.5 Desktop
T-Rex

Top 1 GPU

This GPU

66.

951 Frames/s

4.888 Frames/s

CompuBench 1.5 Desktop
Video Composition

Top 1 GPU

This GPU

383.037 Frames/s

35.338 Frames/s

CompuBench 1.5 Desktop
Bitcoin Mining

Top 1 GPU

This GPU

2600.207 mHash/s

200.

825 mHash/s

GFXBench 4.0
Car Chase Offscreen

Top 1 GPU

This GPU

34770 Frames

7218 Frames

GFXBench 4.0
Manhattan

Top 1 GPU

This GPU

27823 Frames

3691 Frames

GFXBench 4.

0
T-Rex

Top 1 GPU

This GPU

69225 Frames

3335 Frames

GFXBench 4.0
Car Chase Offscreen

Top 1 GPU

This GPU

34770.000 Fps

7218.000 Fps

GFXBench 4.0
Manhattan

Top 1 GPU

This GPU

27823.

000 Fps

3691.000 Fps

GFXBench 4.0
T-Rex

Top 1 GPU

This GPU

69225.000 Fps

3335.000 Fps

3DMark Fire Strike
Graphics Score

Top 1 GPU

This GPU

Name	Value
PassMark — G3D Mark	6031
PassMark — G2D Mark	673
Geekbench — OpenCL	20858
CompuBench 1. 5 Desktop — Face Detection	73.733 mPixels/s
CompuBench 1.5 Desktop — Ocean Surface Simulation	792.440 Frames/s
CompuBench 1.5 Desktop — T-Rex	4.888 Frames/s
CompuBench 1.5 Desktop — Video Composition	35.338 Frames/s
CompuBench 1.5 Desktop — Bitcoin Mining	200.825 mHash/s
GFXBench 4.0 — Car Chase Offscreen	7218 Frames
GFXBench 4.0 — Manhattan	3691 Frames
GFXBench 4.0 — T-Rex	3335 Frames
GFXBench 4. 0 — Car Chase Offscreen	7218.000 Fps
GFXBench 4.0 — Manhattan	3691.000 Fps
GFXBench 4.0 — T-Rex	3335.000 Fps
3DMark Fire Strike — Graphics Score	2293

Games performance

1. Mirror’s Edge Catalyst (2016)

2. Overwatch (2016)

3. Doom (2016)

4. Hitman 2016 (2016)

5. The Division (2016)

6. Far Cry Primal (2016)

7. XCOM 2 (2016)

8. Rise of the Tomb Raider (2016)

9. Rainbow Six Siege (2015)

10. Assassin’s Creed Syndicate (2015)

11. Star Wars Battlefront (2015)

12. Fallout 4 (2015)

13. Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 (2015)

14. Anno 2205 (2015)

15. World of Warships (2015)

16. The Witcher 3 (2015)

17. Dirt Rally (2015)

18. GTA V (2015)

19. Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014)

20. Far Cry 4 (2014)

21. Assassin’s Creed Unity (2014)

22. Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (2014)

23. Alien: Isolation (2014)

24. Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor (2014)

25. Sims 4 (2014)

26. Thief (2014)

27. Battlefield 4 (2013)

28. Metro: Last Light (2013)

29. BioShock Infinite (2013)

30. Tomb Raider (2013)

31. Crysis 3 (2013)

Mirror’s Edge Catalyst (2016)

Low, 1280×720	159.90
Medium, 1366×768	111.80
High, 1920×1080	55.70
Ultra, 1920×1080	50.00
4K, 3840×2160	17.10

Overwatch (2016)

Low, 1280×720	266.70
Medium, 1366×768	206.60
High, 1920×1080	115.70
Ultra, 1920×1080	66. 90
4K, 3840×2160	38.60

Doom (2016)

Low, 1280×720	142.80
Medium, 1366×768	126.80
High, 1920×1080	74.00
Ultra, 1920×1080	68.00
4K, 3840×2160	21.60

Hitman 2016 (2016)

Low, 1280×720	73.30
Medium, 1366×768	71.60
High, 1920×1080	37.10
Ultra, 1920×1080	36.00
4K, 3840×2160	18.70

The Division (2016)

Low, 1280×720	122.60
Medium, 1366×768	91.70
High, 1920×1080	45.00
Ultra, 1920×1080	33.90
4K, 3840×2160	16.60

Far Cry Primal (2016)

Low, 1280×720	115. 00
Medium, 1920×1080	60.00
High, 1920×1080	53.00
Ultra, 1920×1080	37.00
4K, 3840×2160	16.00

XCOM 2 (2016)

Low, 1280×720	90.00
Medium, 1920×1080	56.90
High, 1920×1080	35.60
Ultra, 1920×1080	16.70

Rise of the Tomb Raider (2016)

Low, 1024×768	112.60
Medium, 1366×768	71.30
High, 1920×1080	43.70
Ultra, 1920×1080	36.10
4K, 3840×2160	17.00

Rainbow Six Siege (2015)

Low, 1024×768	248.50
Medium, 1366×768	163.60
High, 1920×1080	90.20
Ultra, 1920×1080	64.50
4K, 3840×2160	27. 20

Assassin’s Creed Syndicate (2015)

Low, 1024×768	82.30
Medium, 1366×768	70.30
High, 1920×1080	47.30
Ultra, 1920×1080	18.90
4K, 3840×2160	16.50

Star Wars Battlefront (2015)

Low, 1024×768	196.90
Medium, 1366×768	144.90
High, 1920×1080	70.10
Ultra, 1920×1080	60.80
4K, 3840×2160	21.20

Fallout 4 (2015)

Low, 1280×720	163.60
Medium, 1366×768	103.40
High, 1920×1080	56.70
Ultra, 1920×1080	44.80
4K, 3840×2160	18.50

Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 (2015)

Low, 1024×768	146. 20
Medium, 1366×768	117.30
High, 1920×1080	63.60
Ultra, 1920×1080	55.80
4K, 3840×2160	20.40

Anno 2205 (2015)

Low, 1024×768	175.20
Medium, 1366×768	124.70
High, 1920×1080	57.00
Ultra, 1920×1080	20.60
4K, 3840×2160	20.90

World of Warships (2015)

Low, 1366×768	183.90
Medium, 1366×768	147.90
High, 1920×1080	125.30
Ultra, 1920×1080	36.40
4K, 3840 x 2160	36.40

The Witcher 3 (2015)

Low, 1024×768	142.80
Medium, 1366×768	86.60
High, 1920×1080	49.80
Ultra, 1920×1080	27. 70

Dirt Rally (2015)

Low, 1024×768	441.40
Medium, 1366×768	180.30
High, 1920×1080	130.90
Ultra, 1920×1080	61.30
4K, 3840×2160	47.10

GTA V (2015)

Low, 1024×768	147.30
Medium, 1366×768	146.10
High, 1920×1080	69.80
Ultra, 1920×1080	28.30

Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014)

Low, 1024×768	125.70
Medium, 1366×768	109.40
High, 1920×1080	58.40
Ultra, 1920×1080	38.60

Far Cry 4 (2014)

Low, 1024×768	113.60
Medium, 1366×768	112.20
High, 1920×1080	65.80
Ultra, 1920×1080	50. 40

Assassin’s Creed Unity (2014)

Low, 1024×768	97.10
Medium, 1366×768	75.80
High, 1920×1080	47.40
Ultra, 1920×1080	21.30

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (2014)

Low, 1024×768	229.90
Medium, 1366×768	139.30
High, 1920×1080	94.60
Ultra, 1920×1080	55.30

Alien: Isolation (2014)

Low, 1024×768	275.00
Medium, 1366×768	217.00
High, 1920×1080	113.30
Ultra, 1920×1080	80.90

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor (2014)

Low, 1280×720	194.70
Medium, 1344×756	131.80
High, 1920×1080	71.80
Ultra, 1920×1080	48. 60

Sims 4 (2014)

Low, 1024×768	178.80
Medium, 1366×768	141.30
High, 1920×1080	107.00
Ultra, 1920×1080	98.30

Thief (2014)

Low, 1024×768	108.60
Medium, 1366×768	100.90
High, 1366×768	91.00
Ultra, 1920×1080	50.60

Battlefield 4 (2013)

Low, 1024×768	198.80
Medium, 1366×768	193.20
High, 1366×768	147.50
Ultra, 1920×1080	58.00

Metro: Last Light (2013)

Low, 1024×768	111.20
Medium, 1366×768	106.40
High, 1366×768	95.90
Ultra, 1920×1080	56.80

BioShock Infinite (2013)

Low, 1280×720	279. 20
Medium, 1366×768	208.90
High, 1366×768	185.40
Ultra, 1920×1080	75.80

Tomb Raider (2013)

Low, 1024×768	484.40
Medium, 1366×768	301.20
High, 1366×768	187.50
Ultra, 1920×1080	89.10

Crysis 3 (2013)

Low, 1024×768	139.70
Medium, 1366×768	123.90
High, 1366×768	91.70
Ultra, 1920×1080	36.10

Specifications (specs)

Architecture	Maxwell 2.0
Code name	GM206
Launch date	22 January 2015
Launch price (MSRP)	$199
Place in performance rating	374
Price now	$229. 99
Type	Desktop
Value for money (0-100)	34.63
Boost clock speed	1178 MHz
Core clock speed	1127 MHz
CUDA cores	1024
Floating-point performance	2,413 gflops
Manufacturing process technology	28 nm
Pipelines	1024
Texture fill rate	72 billion / sec
Thermal Design Power (TDP)	120 Watt
Transistor count	2,940 million

Audio input for HDMI	Internal
Display Connectors	Dual Link DVI-I, HDMI 2. 0, 3x DisplayPort 1.2, 1x DVI, 1x HDMI, 3x DisplayPort
HDCP
Maximum VGA resolution	2048×1536
Multi monitor support
Bus support	PCI Express 3.0
Height	4.376″ (11.1 cm)
Interface	PCIe 3.0 x16
Length	9.5″ (24.1 cm)
Recommended system power (PSU)	400 Watt
SLI options	2x
Supplementary power connectors	1x 6-pins
DirectX	12. 0 (12_1)
OpenGL	4.4
Vulkan
Maximum RAM amount	2 GB
Memory bandwidth	112 GB / s
Memory bus width	128 Bit
Memory clock speed	7.0 GB/s
Memory type	GDDR5
Shared memory	0
CUDA
GameStream
GameWorks
GeForce ShadowPlay
GPU Boost

1440p Benchmarks, 2-Way SLI, And Radeon 285 Showdown

Welcome to part 2 of my Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 review. If you missed it, part 1 focuses on single card 1080p benchmarks, performance, and temps. Get a primer on the GTX 960 by referring back to that. In this installment we’ll analyze how the 2GB, 128-bit GTX 960 handles 1440p (2560 x 1440) gaming in single card and 2-way SLI configurations. We’ll also continue the showdown between Nvidia’s latest «sweet spot» graphics card and the comparatively priced Radeon 285 from AMD.

Note: This review marks a permanent transition from my original
Intel
Core i7-4770K test bench to my X99 platform. As such, I’m gradually redoing all prior benchmarks of existing GPUs, which are normally used for direct performance comparisons, charts, etc. The bad news is that the results today will only include the GTX 960 and Radeon 285 as tested on my new system.

New Test System Specifications:

Intel Core i7-5960x
16GB G.Skill Ripjaws DDR4 2400MHz RAM
ASUS X99-Deluxe motherboard
Samsung EVO 840 1TB SSD
Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 (ASUS Strix) x2
AMD Radeon 285 (ASUS Strix) x2
Windows 8. 1

The cards being evaluated both belong to the ASUS Strix line, and both are factory overclocked above reference levels. What this means is that an apples-to-apples comparison of both cards is impossible, as the GeForce GTX version can’t even be underclocked to reach those reference levels. For our 1440p testing I’ve simply left clock speeds untouched from their factory levels, though it’s worth noting again that the GTX 960 has an insane amount of overclocking potential — up to 22%.

1440p Single GPU Gaming Benchmarks

Only recently has gaming at 1440p become a viable, affordable upgrade to 1080p, with the prices of display tech and graphics card hardware alike inspiring adoption at the enthusiast level. When Nvidia’s GTX 660 — even their GTX 760 — launched, I don’t remember them handling 1440p demands with such grace, and the 760 launched at $249 compared to the 960’s street price of about $209.

1440p is pushing 1.7 times more pixels than 1080p, so you won’t see the consistent 60fps or better performance that was on display in Part 1. That said, I didn’t dial back the graphics settings, and the framerates you’re seeing below are from fairly demanding games at High to Ultra, with taxing options like Anti-Aliasing and Tessellation activated. These just aren’t settings you’re used to seeing at playable framerates with a $200 card, but the Radeon 285 and 960 are both up to the task.

Across these 7 games, a mixture of titles optimized for either AMD or Nvidia hardware, the GTX 960 averages 48fps, whereas the Radeon 285 averages 47.8fps. There are strange discrepancies like Alien: Isolation and Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor, but from a top down view they offer almost dead even performance.

That performance holds true when looking at 3DMark’s Fire Strike Extreme benchmark, with the GTX 960 scoring 3551, and the Radeon 285 a nearly identical 3516.

1440p Two-Way SLI/CrossFire Gaming Benchmarks

Just one appealing factor of these «sweet spot» graphics cards is that, provided you have an adequately sized case, power supply, and supporting motherboard, you can upgrade your initial $200 investment by adding another identical graphics card to the mix. Traditionally, this has been a compelling option.

I remember pitting two $269 MSI 760s — the predecessor to this 960 — against a $1000 Nvidia Titan and staring at my spreadsheet, awestruck, as that SLI setup consistently outperformed the Titan
and 980 at multiple resolutions. Sure, it’s going to consume marginally more power and expel a lot of waste heat, but it’s going to cost less which is often the primary concern for PC gamers.

As I mentioned above, due to some technical difficulties (namely, my motherboard frying) I don’t have a full spectrum of benchmarks to show you across multiple GPUs, so for now let’s directly compare two GTX 960s against two Radeon 285s.

Again we see the cards trading blows, but ultimately settling for a photo finish. Across these seven games, dual GTX 960s turn in an average framerate of 80.8fps. The dual Radeon 285 setup? 83.2fps, barely edging out its competitor.

That’s not the only consideration though. What about scaling? That’s the performance increase we see when moving from single to double cards. At 1440p Nvidia’s 960 turns in 51.3% performance upscaling across all 7 games, and AMD’s Radeon 285 yields a slightly better 56.7% average. Neither of these percentages are fantastic. The situation improves a bit when calling on synthetic benchmarks to test scaling, such as 3DMark’s Fire Strike, where I saw a more realistic 65% upscaling boost in Nvidia SLI, and 66% in CrossFire. Still no outright, decisive victory.

But the real-world difference while gaming sure is noticeable, elevating most of these games to 60fps and well beyond at 1440p. Add an Nvidia G-Sync or forthcoming AMD FreeSync monitor to the mix and you’ve got high resolution gaming nirvana.

Is GTX 960 2-Way SLI Worth It?

I’m still testing the $209 GTX 960 in 2-way SLI against the $559 GTX 980, and my preliminary results show the dual 960s matching or slightly exceeding a single 980s performance, though I’ve only tried 3 games at this point (Tomb Raider, Metro: Last Light, Battlefield 4). Interestingly, the real champion here would seem to be the GTX 970. A pair of 960s will cost you 21% more than a single $329 970 and only yield about 12% better performance.

tl;dr — If you want a solid gaming experience at 1440p, pick up Nvidia’s GTX 970 (or a shockingly cheap Radeon 290/290x). The SLI option doesn’t make as much sense here.

The Full Picture: Beyond The Benchmarks

What we have thus far is arguably a tie, but gaming benchmarks alone don’t paint the entire picture. With pricing this aggressive, we need to evaluate the software ecosystem, power consumption, and temperatures.

Even though the ASUS Strix line boasts exceptional thermals, Nvidia’s second-generation Maxwell architecture just sips power — requiring only a single 6-pin PCIe cable — and with less juice coursing through its veins, that means less heat gets generated.

Running a Furmark Stress Test, I measured the maximum temperatures of both SLI and Crossfire configurations in an open-air case after an hour. The pair of 960s maxed out at a balmy 65C, while the pair of Radeon 285s hit the ceiling at 75C. Still not too shabby, and a testament to ASUS’ DirectCU II cooler. But the smaller size and cooler temperatures win the day here.

Software is another equally important consideration. Both companies offer game DVR options, auto-optimization for graphical settings, and automatic driver updates, although Nvidia handles all of these more elegantly. Raptr’s Game DVR compression leaves much to be desired, and right now G-Sync is the only dynamic refresh rate game in town, although AMD should be launching their G-Sync competitor in March according to a spokesperson.

In my eyes, GeForce Experience is less invasive than Raptr, offers better video recording, and serves up a more elegant approach to driver updates. If only raw performance matters to you, then brand loyalty or simply cheaper prices should help make up your mind, but if the software you’ll use on a daily basis is important, Nvidia has the edge for now.

All told, Nvidia’s GTX 960 is definitely a sweet spot card offering an exceptional amount of performance for the price. Its cooler temperatures and better software suite give Nvidia the victory over its similarly-priced AMD competition for now.

EVGA GeForce GTX 960 review

Our Verdict

The GTX 960 is a decent 1080p, mid-range GPU, and this SuperSuperClocked EVGA version is one of the fastest of its ilk

Tech Specs

GPU — Nvidia GM 206
CUDA cores — 1,024
ROPs — 32
Base clock — 1,279MHz
Boost clock — 1,342MHz
Memory capacity — 2GB GDDR5
Memory bus — 128-bit
PCIe power — 8-pin

The new Maxwell GPU is exactly what you’d expect from a modern mid-range graphics card. It nails 1080p gaming performance, wont tear into your wallet like an angry badger and does it all within a decent thermal and power envelope.

I can’t help but feel underwhelmed, though, which is surprising given how excited I’ve been about the previous Maxwell-based cards . That’s even despite the fact I’ve got one of the most overclocked versions of the GTX 960 sat in my test rig: the EVGA GeForce GTX 960 SuperSC. After witnessing the excellent GeForce GTX 970 far outstripping its predecessor, the GTX 770, the GTX 960’s GPU feels like it’s been designed to only put in the bare minimum of effort.

The GeForce GTX 960 is a generational update to the outgoing GTX 760 and, while it consistently bests it’s forebear across my gaming benchmarks, it doesn’t really do it by any particularly impressive extent. As Nvidia themselves have said to me though, they don’t really see this part as an upgrade from the GTX 760—it’s intended for those who are still sitting on either a GTX 660 or GTX 560.

That is though a pretty hefty demographic, according to Nvidia. They assert that two of three PC gamers are currently running a GTX 660 or older. These people are going to need to upgrade their cards soon for the next glut of games and, if they’re sticking in the same price range, then the new GTX 960 is surely going to be the card for them.

Tech specs

For the GeForce GTX 960 Nvidia have created a new iteration of the Maxwell GPU. The GM 206 is their mid-range Maxwell chip and houses a total of 1,024 CUDA cores spread across eight SMMs. With that comes 64 texture units and some 32 ROPs.

Compared with the Kepler GPU Nvidia used in its GTX 760 that spec’s actually looking a little miserly. The GK 104 chip had a full 1,152 cores across six SMX units with 96 texture units and the same 32 ROPs.

The Maxwell streaming microprocessors (SM) are made up of 128 cores in each opposed to the 192 cores of the old Kepler architecture, but the more efficient new graphics tech is able to nail the same performance with fewer cores.

Considering the GTX 970 still threw in a whole extra SMM unit worth of CUDA cores into its recipe I’d hoped for a bit more oomph in my GTX 960 spec. What we do have though is a much higher clock speed. The older card’s base clock was 980MHz, but the standard GM 206 is set at 1,126MHz with a 1,178MHz boost clock. In practice with this EVGA GTX 960 SuperSC card though I never saw the GPU running at those apparently-conservative speeds.

My review card was consistently hitting between 1,417MHz and 1,430MHz. And even when the EVGA card was powering along at that speed it was never loud. The peak temperature I hit was a mere 73C, and that’s only after a fair bit of work. During desktop use though it’s entirely silent. That’s because when the GPU is running at less than 65C it’s more than happy to operate with the EVGA ACX 2.0+ cooling working in passive mode alone—that means no spinning fans, and no noise. Even when those fans do spool up though the ACX 2.0+ cooling array is seriously quiet in-game.

The memory architecture is the standout news from the GeForce GTX 960 spec sheet. It’s got 2GB of GDDR5—the bare minimum for a gaming graphics card these days, and a 128-bit memory bus, which could be a problem.

The now-familiar refrain from Nvidia is that they’ve got some funky new memory algorithms which make a mockery of such concerns. The Nvidia 128-bit bus is still able to deliver a total memory bandwidth of 112GB/s and with the new memory compression techniques that goes up to an effective 149GB/s. That is still short of the 192GB/s memory bandwidth of the 256-bit bus in the GTX 760 however, but beats the 144GB/s of the GK 106 GPU in the positively geriatric GTX 660.

It’s possible that if the GTX 960 had been released with the same 256-bit bus as its Maxwell brethren then 960 SLI setups could have cannibalised Nvidia’s recent single-card solutions. A pair of 960s is still a potent force, beating a GTX 980 in some benchmarks. But for beyond-1080p resolutions even two of 128-bit memory buses can’t help.

Gaming

As a mid-range 1080p gaming card the EVGA GTX 960 SuperSC performs exactly as you would expect it to. I’m saying that only because we’ve already got similarly priced cards performing at almost exactly the same levels.

Sapphire’s Radeon R9 285 Dual-X is around the same price as EVGA’s seriously overclocked GTX 960 and the two match each other blow for blow in benchmark terms. I’ve also got my hands on an Asus STRIX GeForce GTX 960 OC Edition, which doesn’t quite go as far as the EVGA in terms of clockspeed. But that doesn’t actually seem to matter much in terms of gaming performance. Even though this EVGA card is clocked a good deal higher than the Asus—the SuperSC is hitting 1,430MHz versus the STRIX at 1,354MHz—there’s only a tiny difference in FPS terms.

That’s going to make it tougher to justify the purchase of an expensive overclocked card like either the Asus or this EVGA GTX 960 SuperSC. With a decent cooler most GTX 960 cards are going to be capable of hitting almost identical levels of performance with a little light overclocking.

Despite the fact AMD don’t seem to have released a new GPU in the last epoch, there is one other card vying for attention in this arena: the R9 280. The Tahiti Pro GPU at its heart may be three years old now, but because it was a top-end card of its time it’s rocking a 384-bit bus and 3GB of GDDR5 memory. And it’s considerably cheaper than the GTX 960.

But I still wouldn’t recommend you buy that card over either the R9 285 or any GTX 960. The memory architecture is tempting, but if you’re not looking to stray beyond the bounds of 1080p gaming any time soon you’re much better off with either of the two more modern cards.

On the AMD side you get access to the upcoming FreeSync monitor technology as well as the Radeon version of GPU clock boosting. With the Nvidia card you get access to their monitor syncing tech—G-Sync—as well as a host of other proprietary technologies.

One of the key ones Nvidia have been keen to talk about around the GTX 960 launch is multi-frame anti-aliasing (MFAA) . We spoke about this at the launch of the GTX 980 where it was first introduced, but essentially it’s a new method of anti-aliasing which approximates 4x MSAA by alternately using different 2x samples. MFAA then offers almost identical visual fidelity to 4x MSAA with the performance hit of only 2x MSAA.

Unfortunately it doesn’t work with every game, but where it does you’ll see a bit of a performance boost without a visual hit. It’s also synced with GeForce Experience, so you don’t necessarily have to spend ages digging around to set it up.

These are all just value-added extras though, and it has to come down to which card performs the best. Overall I think the GTX 960, especially in this beefy EVGA SuperSC trim, just about has the edge over the Radeon R9 285. But it’s a close run thing and I’d argue anybody buying either card for a top 1080p gaming PC wouldn’t regret their purchase.

But that still doesn’t make the GTX 960 particularly exciting. People are unlikely to go rushing out to ditch their existing GPU to make way for a GTX 960. No-one’s going to be trolling AMD forums shouting about their GTX 960 setup.

That won’t stop it from selling an absolute shed-load. For the mid-range upgrade market it’s one of only two cards you’d look to for a powerful 1080p gaming rig. So, functional? Hell, yes. Exciting? No.

Benchmarks

DirectX11 synthetic performance

Heaven 4.0 (2560×1600) — (Min) Avg FPS: higher is better
EVGA GTX 960 SuperSC — (10) 20
Asus STRIX GTX 960 OC — (11) 20
Nvidia GTX 760 — (12) 20
AMD Radeon R9 285 — (12) 21

DirectX11 1080p gaming performance

Battlefield 4 — (Min) Avg FPS: higher is better
EVGA GTX 960 SuperSC — (43) 64
Asus STRIX GTX 960 OC — (39) 58
Nvidia GTX 760 — (26) 48
AMD Radeon R9 285 — (34) 54

Bioshock Infinite — (Min) Avg FPS: higher is better
EVGA GTX 960 SuperSC — (14) 73
Asus STRIX GTX 960 OC — (19) 75
Nvidia GTX 760 — (13) 66
AMD Radeon R9 285 — (17) 78

Company of Heroes 2 — (Min) Avg FPS: higher is better
EVGA GTX 960 SuperSC — (22) 34
Asus STRIX GTX 960 OC — (20) 32
Nvidia GTX 760 — (12) 24
AMD Radeon R9 285 — (19) 33

GRID 2 — (Min) Avg FPS: higher is better
EVGA GTX 960 SuperSC — (70) 90
Asus STRIX GTX 960 OC — (70) 90
Nvidia GTX 760 — (58) 75
AMD Radeon R9 285 — (68) 84

Shadow of Mordor — (Min) Avg FPS: higher is better
EVGA GTX 960 SuperSC — (20) 37
Asus STRIX GTX 960 OC — (16) 36
Nvidia GTX 760 — (13) 25
MD Radeon R9 285 — (16) 45

DirectX11 1600p gaming performance

Metro: Last Light — (Min) Avg FPS: higher is better
EVGA GTX 960 SuperSC — (13) 18
Asus STRIX GTX 960 OC — (13) 18
Nvidia GTX 760 — (10) 15
AMD Radeon R9 285 — (13) 18

SLI 1600p gaming performance

Battlefield 4 — (Min) Avg FPS: higher is better
2x Nvidia GTX 960 — (38) 62
Nvidia GTX 970 — (33) 52
Nvidia GTX 980 — (35) 61

GRID 2 — (Min) Avg FPS: higher is better
2x Nvidia GTX 960 — (43) 60
Nvidia GTX 970 — (67) 84
Nvidia GTX 980 — (80) 101

Shadow of Mordor — (Min) Avg FPS: higher is better
2x Nvidia GTX 960 — (8) 37
Nvidia GTX 970 — (29) 46
Nvidia GTX 980 — (21) 57

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EVGA GeForce GTX 960 review

The GTX 960 is a decent 1080p, mid-range GPU, and this SuperSuperClocked EVGA version is one of the fastest of its ilk

Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he’s back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.

GeForce GTX 960 [in 12 benchmarks]

NVIDIA
GeForce GTX 960

PCIe 3.0 x16 interface
Core frequency 1127
Video memory size 2 GB
Memory type GDDR5
Memory frequency 7.0 Gbps
Maximum resolution

Description

NVIDIA starts selling GeForce GTX 960 January 22, 2015 at a suggested price of $199. This is a desktop graphics card based on Maxwell architecture and 28 nm manufacturing process, primarily aimed at gamers. It has 2 GB of GDDR5 memory at 7.0 Gb/s, and coupled with a 128-bit interface, this creates a bandwidth of 112 Gb/s.

In terms of compatibility, this is a dual-slot PCIe 3.0 x16 card. The length of the reference version is 24.1 cm. An additional 1x 6-pin power cable is required for connection, and the power consumption is 120 watts.

It provides poor performance in tests and games at the level of

20.41%

from the leader, which is the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti.

GeForce GTX
960

GeForce RTX
3090 Ti

General information

Price now 85 $ (0.4x) of 49999 (A100 SXM4)

The price is

for obtaining the index of the video taking into account the cost of other cards.

Characteristics

GeForce GTX 960’s general performance parameters such as number of shaders, GPU core clock, manufacturing process, texturing and calculation speed. They indirectly speak about GeForce GTX 960’s performance, but for precise assessment you have to consider its benchmark and gaming test results.

900DA 6 Pipelines of 16384 (Radeon Pro Duo)

Number of stream processors

1024

of 18432 (AD102)

Compatibility and dimensions

Information on GeForce GTX 960 compatibility with other computer components. Useful for example when choosing the configuration of a future computer or to upgrade an existing one. For desktop video cards, these are the interface and connection bus (compatibility with the motherboard), the physical dimensions of the video card (compatibility with the motherboard and case), additional power connectors (compatibility with the power supply). + GeForce ShadowPlay + GPU Boost 2.0 GameWorks +

API support

APIs supported by GeForce GTX 960, including their versions.

DirectX

Benchmark tests

These are the results of GeForce GTX 960 rendering performance tests in non-gaming benchmarks. The overall score is set from 0 to 100, where 100 corresponds to the fastest video card at the moment.

Overall benchmark performance

This is our overall performance rating. We regularly improve our algorithms, but if you find any inconsistencies, feel free to speak up in the comments section, we usually fix problems quickly.

GTX 960
20. 41

Passmark

3DMark 11 Performance GPU

3DMark Vantage Performance

3DMark Cloud Gate GPU

3DMark Fire Strike Score

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics

GeekBench 5 OpenCL

3DMark Ice Storm GPU

GeekBench 5 Vulcan

GeekBench 5 CUDA

Octane Render OctaneBench

Unigine Heaven 4.0

Passmark

This is a very common benchmark included in the Passmark PerformanceTest package. He gives the card a thorough evaluation, running four separate tests for Direct3D versions 9, 10, 11, and 12 (the latter being done at 4K resolution whenever possible), and a few more tests using DirectCompute.

Benchmark coverage: 26%

GTX 960
6030

3DMark 11 Performance GPU

3DMark 11 is Futuremark’s legacy DirectX 11 benchmark. He used four tests based on two scenes: one is several submarines exploring a sunken ship, the other is an abandoned temple deep in the jungle. All tests make extensive use of volumetric lighting and tessellation and, despite being run at 1280×720, are relatively heavy. Support for 3DMark 11 ended in January 2020 and is now being replaced by Time Spy.

Benchmark coverage: 17%

GTX 960
10768

3DMark Vantage Performance

3DMark Vantage is an outdated DirectX 10 benchmark. It loads the graphics card with two scenes, one of which is a girl running away from some kind of military base located in a sea cave, and the other is a space fleet attacking defenseless planet. Support for 3DMark Vantage was discontinued in April 2017 and it is now recommended to use the Time Spy benchmark instead.

Benchmark coverage: 17%

GTX 960
30751

3DMark Cloud Gate GPU

Cloud Gate is a legacy DirectX 11 feature level 10 benchmark used to test home PCs and low-end laptops. It displays several scenes of some strange teleportation device launching spaceships into the unknown at a fixed resolution of 1280×720. As with the Ice Storm benchmark, it was deprecated in January 2020 and 3DMark Night Raid is now recommended instead.

Benchmark coverage: 14%

GTX 960
49918

3DMark Fire Strike Score

Benchmark coverage: 14%

GTX 960
6699

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics

Fire Strike is a DirectX 11 benchmark for gaming PCs. It features two separate tests showing a fight between a humanoid and a fiery creature that appears to be made of lava. Using resolution 1920×1080, Fire Strike shows quite realistic graphics and is quite demanding on hardware.

Benchmark coverage: 14%

GTX 960
7916

GeekBench 5 OpenCL

Geekbench 5 is a widely used benchmark for graphics cards that combines 11 different test scenarios. All of these scenarios are based on the direct use of the processing power of the GPU, without the use of 3D rendering. This option uses the Khronos Group’s OpenCL API.

Benchmark coverage: 9%

GTX 960
20858

3DMark Ice Storm GPU

Ice Storm Graphics is an obsolete benchmark, part of the 3DMark package. Ice Storm has been used to measure the performance of entry-level laptops and Windows-based tablets. It uses DirectX 11 feature level 9 to render a battle between two space fleets near a frozen planet at 1280×720 resolution. Support for Ice Storm ended in January 2020, now the developers recommend using Night Raid instead.

Benchmark coverage: 8%

GTX 960
310860

GeekBench 5 Vulkan

Geekbench 5 is a widely used benchmark for graphics cards that combines 11 different test scenarios. All of these scenarios are based on the direct use of the processing power of the GPU, without the use of 3D rendering. This option uses the Vulkan API from AMD and the Khronos Group.

Benchmark coverage: 5%

GTX 960
22233

GeekBench 5 CUDA

Geekbench 5 is a widely used benchmark for graphics cards that combines 11 different test scenarios. All of these scenarios are based on the direct use of the processing power of the GPU, without the use of 3D rendering. This option uses NVIDIA’s CUDA API.

Benchmark coverage: 5%

GTX 960
17784

Octane Render OctaneBench

This is a dedicated benchmark for measuring graphics card performance in OctaneRender, which is a realistic GPU rendering engine created by OTOY Inc., available either as a standalone program or as a plug-in for 3DS Max, Cinema 4D and many other applications. It renders four different static scenes and then compares the render times to the reference card, which is the GeForce GTX 9 at the moment.80. This benchmark does not measure gaming performance and is intended for professional 3D artists.

Benchmark coverage: 4%

GTX 960
48

Unigine Heaven 4.0

This is an old DirectX 11 based benchmark, a newer version of Unigine 3.0 with relatively minor differences. It depicts a medieval fantasy city spread over several floating islands. The benchmark is still occasionally used despite its significant age, and it was released back in 2013.

Benchmark coverage: 1%

GTX 960
866

Mining hashrates

GeForce GTX 960 performance in cryptocurrency mining. Usually the result is measured in mhash / s — the number of millions of solutions generated by the video card in one second.

Bitcoin / BTC (SHA256) 318 Mh/s

Decred / DCR (Decred) 0.92 Gh/s

Ethereum / ETH (DaggerHashimoto) 8 Mh/s

Monero / XMR (CryptoNight) 0.27 kh/s

Zcash / ZEC (Equihash) 141.47 Sol/s

Game tests

FPS in popular games on the GeForce GTX 960, as well as compliance with system requirements. Remember that the official requirements of the developers do not always match the data of real tests.

Medium FPS

The average frame rate values per second are given in a large set of popular games in various resolutions:

9004

Full HD 66

4K 9004 4K 9004 9K0060

Popular games

Full HD
Low Preset

Full HD
Medium Preset

Full HD
High Preset

Full HD
Ultra Preset

1440p
High Preset

1440p
Ultra Preset

4K
High Preset

4K
Ultra Preset

Cyberpunk 2077 20-22

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey 20-22

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla 20-22

Battlefield 5 20-22

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 20-22

Cyberpunk 2077 20-22

Far Cry 5 20-22

Far Cry New Dawn 20-22

Forza Horizon 4 20-22

Hitman 3 20-22

Horizon Zero Dawn 20-22

Red Dead Redemption 2 20-22

Shadow of the Tomb Raider 20-22

Watch Dogs: Legion 20-22

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey 20-22

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla 20-22

Battlefield 5 20-22

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 20-22

Cyberpunk 2077 20-22

Far Cry 5 20-22

Far Cry New Dawn 20-22

Forza Horizon 4 20-22

Hitman 3 20-22

Horizon Zero Dawn 20-22

Metro Exodus 20-22

Red Dead Redemption 2 20-22

Shadow of the Tomb Raider 20-22

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt 50

Watch Dogs: Legion 20-22

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey 20-22

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla 20-22

Battlefield 5 20-22

Cyberpunk 2077 20-22

Far Cry 5 20-22

Far Cry New Dawn 20-22

Forza Horizon 4 20-22

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt 28

Watch Dogs: Legion 20-22

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 20-22

Hitman 3 20-22

Horizon Zero Dawn 20-22

Metro Exodus 20-22

Red Dead Redemption 2 20-22

Shadow of the Tomb Raider 20-22

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey 20-22

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla 20-22

Battlefield 5 20-22

Cyberpunk 2077 20-22

Far Cry 5 20-22

Far Cry New Dawn 20-22

Forza Horizon 4 20-22

Watch Dogs: Legion 20-22

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 20-22

Hitman 3 20-22

Horizon Zero Dawn 20-22

Metro Exodus 20-22

Red Dead Redemption 2 20-22

Shadow of the Tomb Raider 20-22

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt 20-22

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey 20-22

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla 20-22

Battlefield 5 20-22

Cyberpunk 2077 20-22

Far Cry 5 20-22

Far Cry New Dawn 20-22

Forza Horizon 4 20-22

Watch Dogs: Legion 20-22

Relative performance

Overall GeForce GTX 960 performance compared to its nearest desktop counterparts.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti
104.51

AMD Radeon R9 380
103.77

AMD Radeon R9 380X
102.89

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960
100

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770
97.45

AMD Radeon R9 280X
96.82

AMD Radeon R9 280
93.73

Competitor from AMD

We believe that the nearest equivalent to GeForce GTX 960 from AMD is Radeon R9 380X, which is 3% faster on average and higher by 6 positions in our rating.

Radeon R9 380X

Compare

Here are some of AMD’s nearest GeForce GTX 960 competitors:

AMD Radeon R9 285
110.78

AMD Radeon R9 380
103. 77

AMD Radeon R9 380X
102.89

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960
100

AMD Radeon R9 280X
96.82

AMD Radeon R9 280
93.73

AMD Radeon HD 7990
92.26

Other video cards

Here we recommend several video cards that are more or less similar in performance to the reviewed one.

Radeon R9 280X

Compare

Radeon R9
380

Compare

GeForce GTX
1050 Ti

Compare

GeForce GTX
680

Compare

GeForce GTX
950

Compare

Radeon RX
570

Compare

Recommended Processors

According to our statistics, these processors are most often used with the GeForce GTX 960.

Core i5
4460

5.6%

Core i5
6400

2.3%

Core i5
3470

2.2%

FX
6300

2.2%

Core i3
10100F

1.7%

Core i5
6500

1.6%

Core i7
3770

1.5%

Xeon E5
2620v3

1.5%

Core i5
2400

1.5%

Xeon E5
2689

1. 3%

User rating

Here you can see the rating of the video card by users, as well as put your own rating.

Tips and comments

Here you can ask a question about the GeForce GTX 960, agree or disagree with our judgements, or report an error or mismatch.

Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.

GeForce GTX 960 OEM Review. Benchmarks and features

The GeForce GTX 960 OEM graphics card (GPU) is position 0 in our performance rating. Manufacturer: GEFORCE. Runs a GeForce GTX 960 OEM with a minimum clock speed of 924 MHz. The graphics chip is equipped with an acceleration system and can operate in turbo mode or during overclocking. The RAM size is 4 GB GB with a clock frequency of 7012 MHz and a bandwidth of 112.2 GB/s.

The power consumption of the GeForce GTX 960 OEM is , and the process technology is only 28 nm. Below you will find key compatibility, sizing, technology, and gaming performance test results. You can also leave comments if you have any questions.

Let’s take a closer look at the key features of the GeForce GTX 960 OEM. To have an idea of which video card is better, we recommend using the comparison service.

4.0
From 10
Hitesti Grade

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General information

The basic set of information will help you find out the release date of the GeForce GTX 960 OEM graphics card and its intended use (laptops or PCs), as well as the price at the time of release and the average current cost. This data also includes the architecture used by the manufacturer and the video processor code name.

Performance Rating Position: not rated

Architecture: Maxwell 2.0

Release date: November 26, 2015 (6 years ago)

Current price: $95

GPU Code Name: GM206

Market segment: Desktop

Specifications

This is important information that determines all the performance specifications of the GeForce GTX 960 OEM graphics card. The smaller the technological process of manufacturing a chip, the better (in modern realities). The clock frequency of the core is responsible for its speed (direct correlation), while signal processing is carried out by transistors (the more transistors, the faster the calculations are performed, for example, in cryptocurrency mining).

Core Clock: 924 MHz

Process: 28nm

Number of texels processed in 1 second: 76.86

Floating point: 2.460 gflops

Pipelines / CUDA cores: 1024

Acceleration speed: 1201 MHz

Number of transistors: 2,940 million

Dimensions, connectors and compatibility

There are many form factors of PC cases and laptop sizes today, so it is extremely important to know the length of the video card and its connection types (except for laptop versions). This will help make the upgrade process easier, as Not all cases can accommodate modern video cards.

Interface: PCIe 3. 0 x16

Additional power: None

Memory (frequency and overclocking)

The internal memory is used to store data when performing calculations. Modern games and professional graphics applications place high demands on the amount and speed of memory. The higher this parameter, the more powerful and faster the video card. Memory type, size and bandwidth for GeForce GTX 960 OEM + turbo overclocking capability.

Memory type: GDDR5

Maximum RAM amount: 4GB

Memory bus width: 128 Bit

Memory frequency: 7012 MHz

Memory bandwidth: 112.2 GB/s

Support for ports and displays

As a rule, all modern video cards have several types of connections and additional ports, for example HDMI and DVI . Knowing these features is very important in order to avoid problems connecting a video card to a monitor or other peripherals.

Display connections: No outputs

Technologies

Each graphics card manufacturer complements their products with proprietary technologies that are used both in games and in the workflow. Below is a list of features that will be useful to you.

CUDA: 5.2

API support

All supported by GeForce GTX 960 OEM APIs are listed below. This is a minor factor that does not greatly affect the overall performance.

DirectX: 12 (12_1)

OpenGL: 4.6

Vulkan: 1.1.126

Shader Model: 6. 4

OpenCL: 1.2

Overall gaming performance

All tests are based on FPS. Let’s see how the GeForce GTX 960 OEM ranks in the gaming performance test (calculated according to the game developer’s recommendations for system requirements; it may differ from actual situations).

Select games
Horizon Zero DawnDeath StrandingF1 2020Gears TacticsDoom EternalHunt ShowdownEscape from TarkovHearthstoneRed Dead Redemption 2Star Wars Jedi Fallen OrderNeed for Speed HeatCall of Duty Modern Warfare 2019GRID 2019Ghost Recon BreakpointFIFA 20Borderlands 3ControlF1 2019League of LegendsTotal War: Three KingdomsRage 2Anno 1800The Division 2Dirt Rally 2.0AnthemMetro ExodusFar Cry New DawnApex LegendsJust Cause 4Darksiders IIIFarming Simulator 19Battlefield VFallout 76Hitman 2Call of Duty Black Ops 4Assassin´s Creed OdysseyForza Horizon 4FIFA 19Shadow of the Tomb RaiderStrange BrigadeF1 2018Monster Hunter WorldThe Crew 2Far Cry 5World of Tanks enCoreX-Plane 11. 11Kingdom Come: DeliveranceFinal Fantasy XV BenchmarkFortniteStar Wars Battlefront 2Need for Speed PaybackCall of Duty WWIIAssassin´s Creed OriginsWolfenstein II: The New ColossusDestiny 2MEDLE-Evil Within : Shadow of WarFIFA 18Ark Survival EvolvedF1 2017Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds (2017)Team Fortress 2Dirt 4Rocket LeaguePreyMass Effect AndromedaGhost Recon WildlandsFor HonorResident Evil 7Dishonored 2Call of Duty Infinite WarfareTitanfall 2Farming Simulator 17Civilization VIBattlefield 1Mafia 3Deus Ex Mankind DividedMirror’s Edge CatalystOverwatchDoomAshes of the SingularityHitman 2016The DivisionFar Cry PrimalXCOM 2Rise of the Tomb RaiderRainbow Six SiegeAssassin’s Creed SyndicateStar Wars BattlefrontFallout 4Call of Duty: Black Ops 3Anno 2205World of WarshipsDota 2 RebornThe Witcher 3Dirt RallyGTA VDragon Age: InquisitionFar Cry 4Assassin’s Creed Un ityCall of Duty: Advanced WarfareAlien: IsolationMiddle-earth: Shadow of MordorSims 4Wolfenstein: The New OrderThe Elder Scrolls OnlineThiefX-Plane 10. 25Battlefield 4Total War: Rome IICompany of Heroes 2Metro: Last LightBioShock InfiniteStarCraft II: Heart of the SwarmSimCityTomb RaiderCrysis 3Hitman: AbsolutionCall of Duty : Black Ops 2World of Tanks v8Borderlands 2Counter-Strike: GODirt ShowdownDiablo IIIMass Effect 3The Elder Scrolls V: SkyrimBattlefield 3Deus Ex Human RevolutionStarCraft 2Metro 2033Stalker: Call of PripyatGTA IV — Grand Theft AutoLeft 4 DeadTrackmania Nations ForeverCall of Duty 4 — Modern WarfareSupreme Commander — FA BenchCrysis — GPU BenchmarkWorld in Conflict — BenchmarkHalf Life 2 — Lost Coast BenchmarkWorld of WarcraftDoom 3Quake 3 Arena — TimedemoHalo InfiniteFarming Simulator 22Battlefield 2042Forza Horizon 5Riders RepublicGuardians of the GalaxyBack 4 BloodDeathloopF1 2021Days GoneResident Evil VillageHitman 3Cyberpunk 2077Assassin´s Creed ch Dogs LegionMafia Definitive EditionCyberpunk 2077 1.5GRID LegendsDying Light 2Rainbow Six ExtractionGod of War

low

1280×720

med.

1920×1080

high

1920×1080

ultra

1920×1080

QHD

2560×1440

4K

3840×2160

Horizon Zero Dawn (2020)

low

1280×720

med.

1920×1080

high

1920×1080

ultra

1920×1080

QHD

2560×1440

4K

3840×2160

Death Stranding (2020)

low

1280×720

med.

1920×1080

high

1920×1080

ultra

1920×1080

QHD

2560×1440

4K

3840×2160

F1 2020 (2020)

low

1280×720

med.

1920×1080

high

1920×1080

ultra

1920×1080

QHD

2560×1440

4K

3840×2160

Gears Tactics (2020)

low

1280×720

med.

1920×1080

high

1920×1080

ultra

1920×1080

QHD

2560×1440

4K

3840×2160

Doom Eternal (2020)

low

1280×720

med.

1920×1080

high

1920×1080

ultra

1920×1080

QHD

2560×1440

4K

3840×2160

Description

5 Stutter — The performance of this video card with this game has not yet been studied enough. Based on interpolated information from graphics cards of a similar performance level, the game is likely to stutter and display low frame rates.

May Stutter — The performance of this video card with this game has not yet been studied enough. Based on interpolated information from graphics cards of a similar performance level, the game is likely to stutter and display low frame rates.

30 Fluent — According to all known benchmarks with the specified graphic settings, this game is expected to run at 25 fps or more

40 Fluent — According to all known benchmarks with the specified graphic settings, this game is expected to run at 35fps or more

60 Fluent — Based on all known benchmarks with the specified graphic settings, this game is expected to run at 58fps or more

May Run Fluently — The performance of this video card with this game has not yet been studied enough. Based on interpolated information from graphics cards of a similar performance level, the game is likely to show smooth frame rates.

? Uncertain — testing this video card in this game showed unexpected results. A slower card could deliver higher and more consistent frame rates while running the same reference scene.

Uncertain — The performance of this video card in this game has not yet been studied enough. It is not possible to reliably interpolate data based on the performance of similar cards in the same category.

The value in the fields reflects the average frame rate across the entire database. To get individual results, hover over a value.

GeForce GTX 960 OEM in benchmark results

Benchmarks help determine performance in standard GeForce GTX 960 OEM benchmarks. We have compiled a list of the most famous benchmarks in the world so that you can get accurate results for each of them (see description). Pre-testing the graphics card is especially important when there are high loads, so that the user can see how the graphics processor copes with calculations and data processing.

Overall benchmark performance

4.0
From 10
Hitesti Grade

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GeForce GTX 1060 3GB GP104

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti

GeForce RTX 3050 Max-Q

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Max-Q

GeForce GTX 760 OEM

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 Review. Benchmarks and specs

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 graphics card (GPU) is #168 in our performance ranking. Manufacturer: NVIDIA. Running NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 with a minimum clock speed of 1127 MHz. The graphics chip is equipped with an acceleration system and can operate in turbo mode or when overclocked at a frequency of 1178 MHz. The RAM size is 2 GB GB with a clock speed of 7.0 GB/s and a bandwidth of 112 GB/s.

Power consumption of NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 is 120 Watt, and process technology is only 28 nm. Below you will find key compatibility, sizing, technology, and gaming performance test results. You can also leave comments if you have any questions.

Let’s take a closer look at the most important characteristics of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960. To get an idea of which video card is better, we recommend using the comparison service.

4.1
From 266
Hitesti Grade

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General information

The base set of information will help you find out the release date of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 graphics card and its purpose (laptops or PCs), as well as the price at the time of release and the average current cost. This data also includes the architecture used by the manufacturer and the video processor code name.

Performance Rating Position: 223

Value for money: 60.47

Architecture: Maxwell

Code name: GM206

Type: Desktop

Release date: 22 January 2015 (6 years ago)

Starting price: $199

Current price: $444 (2.2x MSRP)

Value for money: 10.46

GPU Code Name: GM206

Market segment: Desktop

Specifications

This is important information that determines all the power characteristics of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 video card. The smaller the chip manufacturing process, the better (in modern realities). The clock frequency of the core is responsible for its speed (direct correlation), while signal processing is carried out by transistors (the more transistors, the faster the calculations are performed, for example, in cryptocurrency mining).

Conveyors: 1024

Core Clock: 1127 MHz

Acceleration: 1178MHz

Number of transistors: 2,940 million

Process: 28nm

Power consumption (TDP): 120 Watt

Number of texels processed in 1 second: 72 billion/sec

Floating point: 2.413 gflops

CUDA Cores: 1024

Pipelines / CUDA cores: 1024

Acceleration speed: 1178MHz

Number of transistors: 2,940 million

Estimated heat output: 120 Watt

Dimensions, connectors and compatibility

There are many form factors of PC cases and laptop sizes today, so it is extremely important to know the length of the video card and its connection types (except for laptop versions). This will help make the upgrade process easier, as Not all cases can accommodate modern video cards.

Interface: PCIe 3.0 x16

Length: 9.5″ (24.1cm)

Additional power: 1x 6-pins

SLI options: +

Recommended system power (PSU): 400 Watt

Tire support: PCI Express 3.0

Height: 4.376″ (11.1 cm)

Memory (frequency and overclocking)

The internal memory is used to store data when performing calculations. Modern games and professional graphics applications place high demands on the amount and speed of memory. The higher this parameter, the more powerful and faster the video card. Memory type, size and bandwidth for NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 + the ability to overclock in turbo mode.

Memory type: GDDR5

Maximum RAM amount: 2GB

Memory bus width: 128 Bit

Memory frequency: 7.0 GB/s

Memory bandwidth: 112 GB/s

Shared memory: —

Support for ports and displays

As a rule, all modern video cards have several types of connections and additional ports, for example HDMI and DVI . Knowing these features is very important in order to avoid problems connecting a video card to a monitor or other peripherals.

Display connections: Dual Link DVI-I, HDMI 2. 0, 3x DisplayPort 1.2

G-SYNC support: +

Multi monitor support: 4 displays

HDCP: +

Maximum VGA resolution: 2048×1536

Audio input for HDMI: Internal

HDMI: +

Technologies

Each graphics card manufacturer complements their products with proprietary technologies that are used both in games and in the workflow. Below is a list of features that will be useful to you.

3D Vision: +

GPU Boost: 2.0

CUDA: +

GeForce Experience: +

Surround: +

Adaptive Vertical Sync: +

GameStream: +

GeForce ShadowPlay: +

GameWorks: +

API support

All supported by NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 APIs are listed below. This is a minor factor that does not greatly affect the overall performance.

DirectX: 12 (12_1)

OpenGL: 4.4

Vulkan: +

Shader Model: 6.4

OpenCL: 1.2

Overall gaming performance

All tests are based on FPS. Let’s take a look at where the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 ranks in the gaming performance test (the calculation was made in accordance with the recommendations of the game developer for system requirements; it may differ from real situations).

Select games
Horizon Zero DawnDeath StrandingF1 2020Gears TacticsDoom EternalHunt ShowdownEscape from TarkovHearthstoneRed Dead Redemption 2Star Wars Jedi Fallen OrderNeed for Speed HeatCall of Duty Modern Warfare 2019GRID 2019Ghost Recon BreakpointFIFA 20Borderlands 3ControlF1 2019League of LegendsTotal War: Three KingdomsRage 2Anno 1800The Division 2Dirt Rally 2. 0AnthemMetro ExodusFar Cry New DawnApex LegendsJust Cause 4Darksiders IIIFarming Simulator 19Battlefield VFallout 76Hitman 2Call of Duty Black Ops 4Assassin´s Creed OdysseyForza Horizon 4FIFA 19Shadow of the Tomb RaiderStrange BrigadeF1 2018Monster Hunter WorldThe Crew 2Far Cry 5World of Tanks enCoreX-Plane 11.11Kingdom Come: DeliveranceFinal Fantasy XV BenchmarkFortniteStar Wars Battlefront 2Need for Speed PaybackCall of Duty WWIIAssassin´s Creed OriginsWolfenstein II: The New ColossusDestiny 2ELEXThe Evil Survival 2Middle-earth:8 Shadow of WarFIFA EvolvedF1 2017Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds (2017)Team Fortress 2Dirt 4Rocket LeaguePreyMass Effect AndromedaGhost Recon WildlandsFor HonorResident Evil 7Dishonored 2Call of Duty Infinite WarfareTitanfall 2Farming Simulator 17Civilization VIBattlefield 1Mafia 3Deus Ex Mankind Divid edMirror’s Edge CatalystOverwatchDoomAshes of the SingularityHitman 2016The DivisionFar Cry PrimalXCOM 2Rise of the Tomb RaiderRainbow Six SiegeAssassin’s Creed SyndicateStar Wars BattlefrontFallout 4Call of Duty: Black Ops 3Anno 2205World of WarshipsDota 2 RebornThe Witcher 3Dirt RallyGTA VDragon Age: InquisitionFar Cry 4Assassin’s Creed UnityCall of Duty: Advanced WarfareAlien: IsolationMiddle-earth: Shadow of MordorSims 4Wolfenstein: The New OrderThe Elder Scrolls OnlineThiefX-Plane 10. 25Battlefield 4Total War: Rome IICompany of Heroes 2Metro: Last LightBioShock InfiniteStarCraft II: Heart of the SwarmSimCityTomb RaiderCrysis 3Hitman: AbsolutionCall of Duty: Black Ops 2World of Tanks v8Border 2Counter-Strike: GODirt ShowdownDiablo IIIMass Effect 3The Elder Scrolls V: SkyrimBattlefield 3Deus Ex Human RevolutionStarCraft 2Metro 2033Stalker: Call of PripyatGTA IV — Grand Theft AutoLeft 4 DeadTrackmania Nations ForeverCall of Duty 4 — Modern WarfareSupreme Commander — FA BenchCrysi s — GPU BenchmarkWorld in Conflict — BenchmarkHalf Life 2 — Lost Coast BenchmarkWorld of WarcraftDoom 3Quake 3 Arena — TimedemoHalo InfiniteFarming Simulator 22Battlefield 2042Forza Horizon 5Riders RepublicGuardians of the GalaxyBack 4 BloodDeathloopF1 2021Days GoneResident Evil VillageHitman 3Cyberpunk 2077Assassin´s Creed ValhallaDirt 5Watch Dogs LegionMafia Definitive EditionCyberpunk 2077 1.5 GRID LegendsDying Light 2Rainbow Six ExtractionGod of War

low

1280×720

med.

1920×1080

high

1920×1080

ultra

1920×1080

QHD

2560×1440

4K

3840×2160

Horizon Zero Dawn (2020)

low

1280×720

med.

1920×1080

high

1920×1080

ultra

1920×1080

QHD

2560×1440

4K

3840×2160

Death Stranding (2020)

low

1280×720

med.

1920×1080

high

1920×1080

ultra

1920×1080

QHD

2560×1440

4K

3840×2160

F1 2020 (2020)

low

1280×720

med.

1920×1080

high

1920×1080

ultra

1920×1080

QHD

2560×1440

4K

3840×2160

Gears Tactics (2020)

low

1280×720

med.

1920×1080

high

1920×1080

ultra

1920×1080

QHD

2560×1440

4K

3840×2160

Doom Eternal (2020)

low

1280×720

med.

1920×1080

high

1920×1080

ultra

1920×1080

QHD

2560×1440

4K

3840×2160

Description

5 Stutter — The performance of this video card with this game has not yet been studied enough. Based on interpolated information from graphics cards of a similar performance level, the game is likely to stutter and display low frame rates.

May Stutter — The performance of this video card with this game has not yet been studied enough. Based on interpolated information from graphics cards of a similar performance level, the game is likely to stutter and display low frame rates.

30 Fluent — According to all known benchmarks with the specified graphic settings, this game is expected to run at 25 fps or more

40 Fluent — According to all known benchmarks with the specified graphic settings, this game is expected to run at 35fps or more

60 Fluent — Based on all known benchmarks with the specified graphic settings, this game is expected to run at 58fps or more

May Run Fluently — The performance of this video card with this game has not yet been studied enough. Based on interpolated information from graphics cards of a similar performance level, the game is likely to show smooth frame rates.

? Uncertain — testing this video card in this game showed unexpected results. A slower card could deliver higher and more consistent frame rates while running the same reference scene.

Uncertain — The performance of this video card in this game has not yet been studied enough. It is not possible to reliably interpolate data based on the performance of similar cards in the same category.

The value in the fields reflects the average frame rate across the entire database. To get individual results, hover over a value.

AMD equivalent

AMD Radeon R9 380

Compare

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 in benchmark results

Benchmarks help you determine performance in standard NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 benchmarks. We’ve compiled a list of the world’s best-known benchmarks so you can get accurate results for each one (see description). Pre-testing the graphics card is especially important when there are high loads, so that the user can see how the graphics processor copes with calculations and data processing.

Overall performance in benchmarks

AMD Radeon Pro WX Vega M GL

28.01%

AMD Radeon RX 5600M

27.98%

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960

27.67%

AMD Radeon RX 5300

27.56%

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770

3DMark Ice Storm GPU is a dedicated benchmark designed to test the performance of graphics cards and their components. Check out the 3DMark Ice Storm GPU test results for any graphics card at Hitesti.com

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Max-Q

317696

NVIDIA Titan X Pascal

314042

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960

310860

NVIDIA Quadro P620

310112

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 Max-Q

308872

3DMark Cloud Gate GPU is a dedicated benchmark test designed to test the performance of graphics cards and their components. Check out the 3DMark Cloud Gate GPU test results for any graphics card at Hitesti.com

AMD Radeon R9 380

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti Mobile

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960

NVIDIA Quadro M4000M

AMD Radeon RX 5500M

3DMark Fire Strike Score is a dedicated Benchmark test designed to test the performance of graphics cards and their components. Check out the 3DMark Fire Strike Score for any graphics card at Hitesti.com

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti Mobile

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti Max-Q

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics is a special Benchmark that is made for testing GPU and its components. Check 3DMark Fire Strike Graphics test results for any graphic card on Hitesti.com

AMD Radeon R9 280

AMD Radeon R9 M395X

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Max-Q

AMD Radeon Pro Vega 16

3DMark 11 Performance GPU is a special Benchmark that is made for testing GPU and its components. Check 3DMark 11 Performance GPU test results for any graphic card on Hitesti.com

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680M SLI

AMD Radeon R9 280X

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960

AMD Radeon Pro Vega 16

NVIDIA Quadro M4000M

3DMark Vantage Performance is a special Benchmark that is made for testing GPU and its components. Check 3DMark Vantage Performance test results for any graphic card on Hitesti.com

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Ti Max-Q

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Max-Q

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti Mobile

AMD Radeon R9 M295X

Passmark is a special Benchmark that is made for testing GPUs and its components. Check Passmark test results for any graphic card on Hitesti.com

AMD Radeon Pro WX Vega M GL

AMD Radeon RX 5600M

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti Mobile

Unigine Heaven 4.0 is a special Benchmark that is made for testing GPU and its components. Check Unigine Heaven 4.0 test results for any graphic card on Hitesti.com

AMD Radeon R9 380

NVIDIA Quadro M3000M

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580

Octane Render OctaneBench is a special Benchmark that is made for testing GPU and its components. Check Octane Render OctaneBench test results for any graphic card on Hitesti.com

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 Ti OEM

NVIDIA Quadro M3000M

4.1
From 266
Hitesti Grade

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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050

AMD Radeon R9 380

AMD Radeon RX 550

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 3 GB

AMD Radeon RX 560

NVIDIA GeForce 820A

AMD Radeon R9370

AMD Radeon HD 6570 OEM

AMD Ellesmere

Testing Nvidia GeForce video cards (from GTX 960 to GTX 1080 Ti) in the game Shadow of the Tomb Raider on Zotac solutions

Brief information about the game

Release date: September 14, 2018

Genre: adventure

Publisher: Square Enix

Developers: Eidos Montreal/Crystal Dynamics/Nixxes Software

Rise of the Tomb Raider Performance Test

Shadow of the Tomb Raider is a third-person adventure game from a very popular series. The next part of the adventures of Lara Croft is a continuation of the games of past years, the continuation of the series was announced in March 2018, and the release of the game took place in versions for PC and the modern generation of Sony PlayStation and Microsoft Xbox consoles in September. Interestingly, the Canadian studio Eidos Montreal, known for such games as Thief, Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, worked mainly on Shadow of The Tomb Raider, and not the creators of the previous parts of the series from Crystal Dynamics.

Development of Shadow of the Tomb Raider started back in 2015. Additional support for Eidos Montreal during development was carried out by Crystal Dynamics and Nixxes Software, and the latter worked specifically on the PC version. On March 15, 2018, publisher Square Enix confirmed the development of a sequel and announced the game’s release date. The first official trailer for the game was released on April 27, 2018, and the gameplay was shown in June at E3 2018. The release was scheduled for September 14, 2018, but pre-orders could start playing as early as September 12.

The game takes place a couple of months after the events of Rise of the Tomb Raider. Events take place on the Mexican island of Cozumel and in South America. The player will meet crowds of mercenaries and various ancient forces guarding local relics in the rainforests and mountains. Shadow of the Tomb Raider is one of the darkest games in the series, in which Lara’s rage and desire to avenge her father’s death overshadow the usual saving of the world.

In addition to Mexico, Lara will visit other places and several historical periods. This time, she is looking for puzzle pieces in several time periods, solving difficult quests along the way. Under the control of the player, she explores the most interesting parts of our planet, such as underwater caves in South America.

Compared to previous games, the level size in the new series is increased, and the passage is not quite linear. In the new game of the series, more emphasis was placed on stealth, Lara suddenly attacks the mercenaries from the Trinity organization, including with the help of a silent bow, and then hides in the jungle, skillfully disguised. She also carefully examines the territory and bypasses dangerous traps.

Climbing and scuba diving capabilities have been significantly improved in the next game of the series. But driving vehicles or shooting with two hands will not work. Other than that, it’s a familiar adventure game with deadly traps and challenging puzzles that has received mostly positive reviews with an average rating of 75%-80%, which isn’t too bad at all.

Games of the series have traditionally been distinguished by fairly high-quality graphics, which help to achieve a deep immersion of the player in the virtual world of Lara Croft. The project is based on the studio’s own engine — the Foundation Engine, which Crystal Dynamics has been using and improving for many years.

The engine proved to be excellent on various platforms of several generations, and with the transition to the current generation consoles, it acquired support for many modern technologies: physically-correct rendering (Physically Based Rendering), HDR rendering with adaptive tone mapping, advanced deferred lighting, simulated global shading , improved hair simulation, tessellation, and more.

The game also uses volumetric lighting (God Rays effect), advanced post-filtering effects, dynamic waves and reflections on the surface of the water, particle systems with correct lighting rendering, and subsurface scattering effect for more realistic skin rendering. The scenes in the game traditionally have good detail, although sometimes you can still see that the main limiter has already become fairly outdated consoles.

The PC version of the game traditionally has some graphical improvements, such as increased detail in the game world, as well as support for high resolution textures and screen resolutions. Also, our version of Shadow of the Tomb Raider is distinguished by the fact that, as part of Nvidia’s technology and marketing support program, the project is optimized for GeForce GPUs, and the game supports several proprietary technologies of the Californian company, including Ansel — the ability to capture high-quality screenshots in increased resolution and with the use of additional processing, and ShadowPlay Highlights — automatic capture and recording of game achievements.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider does not support many of Nvidia’s new rendering techniques at the time of release, there is only an advanced HBAO+ global shading calculation algorithm, which is of good quality and reduced artifacts compared to other global shading techniques, and also provides higher detail shaded areas. HBAO+ runs quite efficiently on modern GPUs compared to other widely used algorithms of similar quality.

But in future updates of the game, the long-awaited support for real-time ray tracing should appear. With the help of Nvidia RTX technology, the game will need to render more realistic and physically correct shadows from more types of light sources — with correct penumbra and self-shadowing, as well as translucent shadows.

In addition, the game developers and Nvidia engineers are working together to implement support for a unique method of full-screen anti-aliasing (or rather image enhancement, which is even closer to the truth) — DLSS, a smart neural network that uses the power of the tensor cores of the GeForce RTX family of video cards to improve the quality of high-resolution images. Alas, the release dates for all these game updates are still unknown.

System requirements

Minimum system requirements:

CPU Intel Core i3-3220 or equivalent AMD ;

RAM 8 GB ;

graphics card Nvidia GeForce GTX 660/GTX 1050 or AMD Radeon HD 7770 ;

space on a 40 GB drive ;

64-bit operating system Microsoft Windows 7

Recommended System Requirements :

CPU Intel Core i7-4770K or AMD Ryzen 5 1600 ;

RAM 16 GB ;

graphics card Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 6GB or AMD Radeon RX 580 8GB ;

space on a 40 GB drive ;

64-bit operating system Microsoft Windows 10

Any modern version of Microsoft’s operating system, starting from Windows 7, is suitable for Shadow of the Tomb Raider, as the game also supports the DirectX 11 graphics API. Using DirectX 12 and Windows 10 for the game, although not necessary, is highly recommended , since this tandem works better on modern multi-core CPUs. The need for 64-bit versions of operating systems has long become familiar to all modern game projects, as this allows you to get away from the limitation of 2 GB of used RAM per process.

The game’s hardware requirements are average or slightly above average. As the minimum suitable video cards for the game, although not the most powerful by modern standards, the models of video cards Radeon HD 7770 and GeForce GTX 660 or GTX 1050 are indicated, but not the weakest either. You need to understand that these are only the most minimal requirements that will allow you to somehow play with low quality settings.

RAM requirements are typical — to run the game you will need at least 8 GB of RAM, which is in line with the usual requirements for modern projects. There are no separate requirements for the minimum amount of video memory, but according to our estimates, 3-4 GB should be enough for the game, especially for Full HD resolution and low settings.

The central processor needs at least an Intel Core i3-3220 or similar AMD (something from the FX series) — also far from the top level among CPUs, and even not from modern generations. However, the recommendations already indicate significantly more powerful Core i7-4770K and AMD Ryzen 5 1600 processors, which is common for games with modern graphics.

The recommended requirements for video cards are set to medium — to play at a resolution of 1920×1080 with 60 FPS on average at high graphics settings, you will need a gaming system with Radeon RX 580 or GeForce GTX 1060 video cards, but always their older versions, with 8 and 6 GB memory, respectively. This is really close to reality and according to our observations. In general, judging by the recommended requirements, Shadow of the Tomb Raider makes requirements close to typical by modern standards for the power of universal and graphics processors.

Test configuration and testing methodology

Alas, we don’t have GeForce RTX video cards in this series of gaming tests with Zotac solutions yet, but there is some chance that at least one of the new products will appear in tests before the end of this year. We’ll have to wait a little longer.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider is part of Nvidia’s marketing and technology program and already supports some of the GPU manufacturer’s effects, but more will be added over time, including ray tracing. When testing, we simply used the latest version of the driver for GeForce video cards at that time — 416.34 WHQL dated 10/11/2018 , which includes optimizations for all recent game projects, including Shadow of the Tomb Raider.

Fortunately, the game has a built-in performance test, familiar to us from previous games in the Tomb Raider series. This time it is even better than the previous ones, although it is still not perfect. The three test scenes are very different in content, which is not bad, but rather long in time, so we had to save time when testing. In this form, the test helps users find the right settings for their system, and the difference in average frame rate during runs is not too large.

The test scenes use various effects, the first one has a large number of characters and lights (it is clearly intended for future ray tracing), the third shows a large-scale location, and the resulting frame rate in general is approximately the same as that observed in a typical game, therefore, the benchmark can be considered as a gaming one.

Built-in performance tester provides detailed statistics at the end of the job. Information is displayed not just about the received minimum, average and maximum frame rates, but in three forms at once: calculation of game logic on the CPU, rendering on the CPU and GPU.

Naturally, the whole process will be limited by the weakest point. That is, if the frame rate of the CPU Render is lower than the GPU, then the game rests on the processor, and you can safely increase the graphics settings. Conversely, if the GPU is showing the lowest FPS, then lowering the graphics settings will increase the overall smoothness. Made very comfortable.

We ran our test and displayed statistics on the use of CPU and GPU resources using utility MSI Afterburner . CPU load during testing at medium and maximum settings ranged from 30% to 50% on average, reaching 70% at peaks! This is a lot, such demanding games are extremely rare.

On the other hand, the frame rate is quite high, because the developers have done a good job of optimizing the DirectX 12 version of their engine compared to the previous game in the series, and the CPU cores are loaded very evenly this time. 1-2 cores are slightly allocated, busy with the main work, but the rest of the cores are not idle at all:

The GPU in the test is loaded with work at 95%-99% when running on a system with a high-end video card at the highest settings, but in the case of medium settings and a powerful video card, the GPU utilization drops to about 75%-90% (highly depends on parts of the benchmark, of which there are three), so that the emphasis on the ability of the CPU, even with excellent optimization, sometimes remains, although not constant.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider has somewhat higher than average CPU power requirements and would like at least a multi-threaded dual-core CPU, but at least a decently high-performance quad-core CPU would be best.

In tests, we measure not only the average, but also the minimum frame rate, since both the smoothness of the video sequence and the overall comfort for the player depend on it. Based on the average and minimum frame rates from our test, it is quite possible to draw conclusions about the overall comfort of the game. Since this is a dynamic game, a stable 60 FPS is ideally desirable, but it can be played at an average of 40-45 FPS, but without falling below 30 FPS. This is the bare minimum, even when the frame rate drops to 25 FPS, it becomes much more difficult to play, control delays grow to uncomfortable.

If we talk about the level of video memory usage by the game Shadow of the Tomb Raider, then at Full HD-resolution and just high settings, the game will be enough video cards with 3-4 GB of on-board memory. In the case of higher resolutions or the highest / maximum settings, you need 6-8 GB of video memory. And if we talk about 4K resolution, then even more. The RAM requirements of the game are typical for modern projects, the total memory consumption during the game is about 8 GB, which is really a reasonable minimum.

Effect of settings on performance and quality

Shadow of the Tomb Raider graphic settings can be changed both in a separate configurator when starting the game, and from the menu of the game itself. Moreover, in the second case, changing any settings is immediately activated — without the need to restart the game and even the level, which is very convenient when looking for suitable settings. Only changing the quality of the textures makes it necessary to wait for some time to reload the resources of the required quality, but everything also happens on the fly.

In the main graphics menu, you can change the version of the DirectX graphics API used, the screen resolution, the output mode (full screen or windowed), adjust the brightness and refresh rate of the screen, select the vertical sync method, configure the HDR monitor and stereo output, and select the full screen anti-aliasing method: SMAA, TAA, SMAAT2x and SMAA4x. As far as HDR modes are concerned, Shadow of the Tomb Raider supports G-Sync HDR monitors and other HDR displays that can improve quality by increasing contrast and color cast.

Selecting the version of DirectX in the case of Shadow of the Tomb Raider is quite simple. Even in the previous game in the series, it was already worth turning on DirectX 12, since this version made it possible to use the capabilities of multi-core CPUs more efficiently, and even in the game in question, you can get an increase of up to one and a half times if you focus on the performance of one of the CPU cores. However, more often the difference turns out to be slightly smaller, but it always remains in favor of a more modern version of the API. So choosing DirectX 12 is recommended for all modern GeForce graphics cards.

When playing in windowed mode, the setting for changing the rendering resolution is available — Resolution Modifier . With it, you can further reduce the rendering resolution to 20% of the selected game resolution. Naturally, this seriously affects performance if it focuses on the power of the GPU. And with a weak video card, this slider can be an option, if even the minimum settings do not give you the necessary smoothness when playing. But remember that the Resolution Modifier is the last thing to touch, as it greatly degrades the quality.

Let’s consider what improves the picture — full-screen anti-aliasing. The game has a setting Anti-Aliasing , which allows you to select one of several algorithms. SMAA is the simplest anti-aliasing method, removing sharp polygon edges in most cases quite effectively and with very little performance degradation. It blurs the image quite a bit (less than FXAA in the previous game) and does not eliminate temporal aliasing artifacts in the form of “jumping” pixels.

For most systems, it will be better to choose the second method of full-screen anti-aliasing — TAA, also a very fast post-processing filter, complemented by a temporary component that eliminates artifacts such as flickering pixels, but it additionally blurs the picture compared to SMAA. And then there is SMAAT2x, which combines the SMAA and TAA methods and their advantages — that is, something in between in terms of quality.

As an alternative method on the most powerful systems, you can use another method — SMAA4x, which will give even better anti-aliasing, adding the use of multisampling. The method is similar to SMAAT2x in conjunction with SMAAS2x — a variant of SMAA with the addition of MSAA 2x for better quality smoothing of polygon faces. All this increases the quality of anti-aliasing, but at the same time significantly reduces performance and clarity, blurring the picture even more.

The use of SMAA4x can be recommended to fans of high-quality pictures and at the same time owners of powerful video cards. For mid-range video cards, the most resource-intensive method will not be practical in any case, enabling SMAA4x leads to a drop in rendering speed immediately by a third, while all other methods without using MSAA reduce the average FPS by only 5% -7% (2-4 FPS). So choose the anti-aliasing method to your taste, getting either better smoothed polygon edges, but a more soapy picture, or vice versa.

The golden mean, in our opinion, is the SMAAT2x method, which has a fairly high-quality smoothing of polygon faces, good elimination of temporary artifacts, and also copes well with smoothing textures and Lara’s hair while maintaining image clarity and high performance. Compared to it, SMAA has no temporal anti-aliasing, TAA is too blurry, and SMAA4x reduces performance more than improves rendering quality.

In the game, you can choose one of the preset graphics quality settings profiles or use your own. In our further work, we used the profiles Medium (medium settings), High (high settings) and the highest settings — Highest. For three settings, we also applied different anti-aliasing modes: TAA, SMAAT2X and SMAA4x, respectively.

Medium settings
High settings
Highest settings

As always, it’s best to adjust rendering quality and final performance to your own personal requirements, based on your own feelings. The influence of some parameters on the resulting rendering quality in the game is not always noticeable, especially on screenshots. From the videos, it’s a little easier to notice the different rendering quality corresponding to the different levels of graphics settings, but it’s also not very easy.

The medium profile differs from the highest quality mode with lower resolution textures, simpler lighting and shading, lower quality effects and anti-aliasing, although the difference is still not that big. Moreover, full-screen anti-aliasing in the game is enabled for all quality profiles separately, and basically uses post-processing that is not the most demanding on GPU power.

Medium settings:

Highest settings:

Consider the rendering quality settings available in the Shadow of the Tomb Raider game menu. We conducted the study on a test system with a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics card at 1920×1080 resolution with maximum settings that best suit this GPU. By changing the parameters down, we determined how much performance was increased in this case — this approach allows you to quickly find the settings that most affect the average frame rate.

Additional tab Graphics in the game menu allows you to change many game graphics settings, including the quality of textures and their filtering, the level of geometric detail, the quality of shadows and post-processing effects, you can enable tessellation and use PureHair advanced hair rendering, as well as select the method of global shading — Ambient Occlusion.

This technique produces more realistic shadows that are rendered differently than typical dynamic shadow rendering schemes with shadow maps, but creates additional soft shadows in the corners between objects in the scene using post-processing of the finished frame. Without Ambient Occlusion, the scenes look too flat and unrealistic, and many objects seem to hang in the air, not being tied to the rest of the virtual world.

The game has an option Ambient Occlusion , which allows you to choose from two methods of rendering global occlusion: an SSAO technique created by Microsoft and Crystal Dynamics called Broad Temporal Ambient Obscurance (BTAO) and Horizonal-Based Ambient Occlusion (HBAO +) by the company Nvidia, which allows you to get the highest quality shading. Initially, the Nvidia algorithm was developed back in 2008, but later it received additional modifications to improve quality and performance. Using HBAO+ gives more accurate global shading with quality shadows, but at a somewhat higher rendering time.

Enabling BTAO has little effect on performance — the rendering speed drops by a couple of frames per second, but forcing HBAO + causes a slightly more significant drop in speed — by about the same amount. Accordingly, for sufficiently powerful systems, it is better to use HBAO + as the highest quality method, but for medium systems, the BTAO method will be sufficient as an excellent compromise between quality and rendering speed. We do not recommend disabling global shading at all, you will lose too much in image quality.

Texture Quality — Adjusts the texture resolution used in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Texture quality is one of the most important parameters for any game, although from the point of view of the impact on the final image quality, it will not be easy to find any difference between the extreme settings during the game — it will be noticeable only on some objects that are close to the camera and characters when big plans.

With the setting set to Ultra, the requirements for video memory increase dramatically, and 4 GB of local video memory may not be enough, 6-8 GB are needed. Accordingly, for video cards with 3-4 GB of memory onboard, we recommend using the High setting, otherwise you may experience jerks and drops in performance below a comfortable frame rate, especially unpleasant in heated battles. If textures, buffers and other resources are included in the local memory of the video card, as on our GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, the effect of the settings on performance is quite insignificant — in the region of 1-2 FPS. So set the setting depending on the amount of VRAM of your video card and the selected resolution and settings.

Setting Texture Filtering allows you to change the level of anisotropic filtering for textures in the game, which affects their clarity. This is especially noticeable at a distance from the camera for surfaces at an acute angle to it. Without the inclusion of anisotropic filtering, many of these surfaces will be heavily blurred, which significantly reduces the overall image quality.

On modern systems, there is no point in choosing a parameter that differs from the maximum possible 16x, since turning on anisotropic filtering does not reduce speed as much as it worsens the quality of rendered surfaces. The difference in rendering speed between the extreme levels of the setting does not exceed a couple of frames per second, so on all modern GPUs we strongly advise you to use the highest possible value for this setting.

Setting Shadow Quality affects the quality of shadow rendering in the game, which is clear from its name. The parameter affects the resolution of shadow maps, their detail and filtering. When set to lower values, some fine detail in the shadows is lost, and shadow flickering artifacts begin to appear, especially noticeable when moving. Since shadows are the most important component of the picture, directly affecting the overall realism, we do not recommend disabling shadows unless you have the weakest system.

For sufficiently powerful GPUs, it is better to turn on the High or Ultra level — even though this setting affects the performance of the game quite noticeably, the difference between the extreme values \u200b\u200bis obtained by more than 15%. But this applies to such a powerful graphics card as the GTX 1080 Ti, and on weak and old systems, the difference can be greater. Look at the situation in general.

Effects Bloom and Depth of Field have long been known, the first of them enhances the glow of bright areas of the frame, adding brightness to them, and the second is used to give a cinematic effect, blurring the background. Such effects usually do not take too much performance, and it is recommended to leave them enabled if you generally have enough performance. If there is not enough of it, you can turn off the Bloom post-filter, getting a couple of FPS on top with a slight loss in quality.

As for Depth of Field, in Shadow of the Tomb Raider it is used in in-engine scenes to simulate a motion picture and occasionally blurs the foreground in-game when set to High. Actually, in the gameplay you will not lose more than 1-1.5 FPS, but in the scenes on the engine, the drop can be large — up to 2-3 FPS. However, cinematic scenes usually don’t require ultra-high performance anyway.

The same applies to other post-filters. Let’s say parameter Lens Flares adds a halo effect to flashlights and other lights in the dark, and turning it on or off has almost no effect on performance. Or Volumetric Lighting, which adds an imitation of visible rays of light that are very well visible in the jungle and add spectacularity to the picture. Shadow of the Tomb Raider uses a fairly simple post-filtered volumetric lighting method, so it reduces rendering performance by a very small amount, at most 1 FPS on average.

The Screen Effects setting includes several effects at once: blood, dirt, water and others — all of them also have an extremely weak effect on rendering performance, and if smoothness is sufficient, it is better to leave all of them enabled. But with Motion Blur traditionally see for yourself, if you like the effect, turn it on. It has almost no effect on rendering speed.

Parameter Level of Detail , as its name implies, is responsible for the geometric detailing of the scene. And not only for the level of detail, but also for the range of drawing objects at medium and long distances. In addition to this, the LOD parameter affects the visibility range of effects and shadows. This setting allows you to find the right balance between scene detail and rendering performance, which is especially important on weak systems.

Changing the LOD level on modern systems doesn’t have much of an effect on performance, even when the maximum value is selected. The difference between the minimum and maximum levels of detail (Lowest and Ultra) can reach up to 5-8 frames on average. We would not recommend setting it too low, as objects start to appear too late, killing realism. Even on older systems with low core count CPUs, it’s worth trying at least Normal.

Tessellation is a tessellation setting that is used in the game to increase the level of detail of many objects: walls, stones, earth, tree bark and other surfaces. It greatly increases the level of detail and gives volume to the scenes. All this extra geometric detail is also included in the HBAO+ global shading calculation, which further adds to the realism of the picture.

The performance impact of the setting is not too great, at least on powerful Nvidia video cards with high geometric performance. We recommend leaving tessellation enabled on all modern GPUs as it adds detail and realism. On the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, there was only a 5% difference in average frame rates, but older GPUs can suffer more. So if you need this extra performance, you can safely disable tessellation.

Setting Screen Space Reflections is responsible for the inclusion of realistic reflections on many surfaces in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and also affects the lighting of the scene. The most obvious effect of this setting is noticeable in the reflection of the surrounding world on water surfaces, which significantly improves the perception of the game world. The performance difference between enabling and disabling the effect in this game is highly dependent on the scene and can be up to 7-8 FPS when rendering large water surfaces. So if you don’t have enough performance at these moments, you can turn off the effect, but it’s better to try turning off others first, as realistic reflections greatly affect realism.

Another technique that uses screen space is Screen Space Contact Shadows . It works in some scenes with direct sunlight and improves shadow detail on and around Lara. The effect is almost imperceptible during the game, and is far from always visible, so you can safely turn it off, since even the Normal value can reduce the rendering speed by 5-6 FPS.

Option Pure Hair is responsible for enabling advanced character hair rendering technology developed by Crystal Dynamics and similar to Nvidia HairWorks. It adds the physically correct interaction of tens of thousands of hairs to character models. Such hair interacts realistically with other objects and clothing, and physically sways with movement and when exposed to wind and water. They are also more realistically lit and shadowed than more conventional hair rendering methods.

Pure Hair can be set to Low or Normal. For Shadow of the Tomb Raider, we can recommend using Normal for all systems, and Low is suitable for very weak systems that require minimal quality settings. The difference between these levels is only noticeable when Lara runs and jumps with her hair flying. But in the videos on the game engine, when it is shown in close-up, the differences between the levels of detail will be obvious.

The influence of the enabled effect on the average performance during a typical game process is not too great — the difference is up to 2-3 frames per second on average, but in close-ups it can reach 7-10 FPS. Which can be noticeable on a weak system, so you should pay attention to the hair quality setting if the scenes on the engine are very slow.

Summing up this part, we will indicate brief recommendations: if there is a lack of performance, the first thing to do is turn off subtle Screen Space Contact Shadows and not too obvious tessellation, select High for the quality of the shadows, turn off some of the post-effects (Depth of Field, Bloom, Lens Flares and Screen Effects) to taste, select the level of detail LOD high (High), not maximum. Such optimizations will significantly improve the performance of the game without too much impact on the final image.

Benchmarking

We have tested the performance of Zotac video cards based on Nvidia GPUs in different price ranges and GPU generations from the California-based company. When testing, the three most common screen resolutions were used: 1920 × 1080, 2560 × 1440 and 3840 × 2160, as well as three settings profiles: medium, high and highest (Medium, High and Highest), with different anti-aliasing algorithms.

Below average settings are not considered, since even the weakest video card of our comparison, the GeForce GTX 960, copes well with them, even in Full HD resolution. Traditionally, for the materials of our site, we also check the mode (this time — almost) of maximum quality, the most popular setting option among gaming enthusiasts. First, let’s check out the most popular Full HD resolution at medium quality settings.

Resolution 1920×1080 (Full HD)

Under such simple conditions, all GeForce graphics cards were able to provide comfort, and many of them were close to the fact that the frame rate did not fall below 60 FPS. The younger model of the old generation in the form of the GeForce GTX 960 at medium graphics settings and Full HD resolution showed 40 FPS on average with frame rate drops of at least 32 FPS, which means that playing it will be quite comfortable for most ordinary players.

If even the lower GPU of our comparison provides smooth gameplay, more powerful video cards did even better in such simple conditions, showing 59-114 FPS on average. The average ones do not reach the ideal smoothness, falling to the minimum 48-54 FPS, but not bad either. But the top two solutions of the GeForce GTX line are able to provide smoothness even on gaming monitors with a fairly high refresh rate.

The transition from medium to high settings resulted in a not too big drop in performance, but the relatively weak GeForce GTX 960 was no longer able to provide a minimum level of comfort, showing an average frame rate of 36 FPS with a minimum of 29FPS — even undemanding gamers will want to slightly lower some of the graphical settings to an average level.

Enthusiasts would like to have more powerful GPUs that have shown comfortable performance with an average frame rate of 54-62 FPS. Mid-range graphics cards dropped the frame rate to 43-52 FPS, but this remains a fairly comfortable level, at which it is unlikely that you will need to lower the graphics settings. Well, the most demanding players should pay attention to the older GPUs of our comparison, which showed noticeably more than 60 FPS both on average and at least. Moving on to the highest (though not the highest) quality:

But the highest graphics settings, along with anti-aliasing using the SMAA4x method, crippled the performance of the GeForce GTX 960 in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, well below the minimum allowable threshold. It is no longer possible to play with 23 FPS on average when the frame rate drops to 18 FPS. And the average-powered GPUs from our comparison have far from shown quite comfortable playability.

The older model GeForce GTX 1060 did not drop below 40 FPS in average frame rate with a minimum value of 32 FPS, which is enough for comfort, but the younger model is already clearly lacking 3 GB of video memory — its 30 FPS on average is not suitable for the game. Somewhere in between is the GTX 970, which is also not enough for its 4 GB (in fact, even more likely 3.5 GB) of memory, but on it you can at least slightly lower the settings by switching anti-aliasing to SMAAT2x, and get the required comfort.

With the highest rendering quality in this game, only the top model of the Pascal family is able to provide perfect smoothness on monitors with a refresh rate of 60-75 Hz. After all, even the GeForce GTX 1070 sometimes drops to 45 FPS, showing only 56 FPS on average, which is not enough for ideal comfort with a stable 60 FPS.

Resolution 2560×1440 (WQHD)

When the rendering resolution is set to 2560×1440 pixels, the load on the GPU noticeably increases, and the junior GeForce GTX 960 model in these conditions no longer copes with the task of providing minimal comfort: 25 FPS on average with a minimum of 21 FPS — this is definitely not enough for a smooth games.

Zotac’s trio of mid-rangers provided at least minimal comfort in these conditions. The GTX 970 with a pair of GTX 1060s averaged 39-44 FPS with a minimum of 32-37 FPS, which means it’s fairly smooth to play. The most powerful GeForce GTX 1080 Ti was able to show more than 60 minimum FPS, providing 88 FPS on average, and even the GeForce GTX 1070 was pretty close to this cherished bar.

When switching to high settings, the performance drop is small, we no longer look at the GeForce GTX 960, its average frame rate of 23 FPS is critically low. The power of the GTX 1070 GPU is enough to maintain the frame rate at almost 60 FPS, but only on average. Well, the most powerful GPU was able to show performance without falling below this important mark.

Three averages (both GeForce GTX 1060 and GTX 970) at high settings at this resolution with varying degrees of success provide the minimum sufficient level of performance. Nominally, only the older model GTX 1060 copes with the task, showing an average of 41 FPS with a minimum frame rate of 35 FPS, which is quite enough for comfort. And here is the GTX 970 and GTX 1060 3GB provide an average frame rate of 34-36 FPS, which is already not enough. It is possible that users of these GPUs will have to lower the settings below the high level.

The 2560×1440 resolution at the highest quality graphics in Shadow of the Tomb Raider poses a very difficult task for the GPU. In fact, only the top-end solution can cope with it, and even then only with a stable 40-50 FPS, but not 60 frames per second. This card saw drops below 45 FPS with only 55 FPS on average. This will be enough, but demanding players may be uncomfortable.

What can I say, if the GTX 1070 did not reach the required bar of 40 FPS on average, although it did not fall below 30 FPS. For owners of this video card, we advise you to reduce several graphics settings to just high, or even better, change the anti-aliasing algorithm to the less demanding SMAAT2x. Mid-range graphics cards have shown performance of 20-26 FPS on average with at least 14-21 FPS, which is too low. We are generally silent about the GTX 960.

Resolution 3840×2160 (4K)

Requirements for fillrate (fillrate) when choosing a 4K resolution increase fourfold compared to Full HD, and almost all Zotac video cards presented in the test failed to provide even a minimum of smoothness in such conditions. Even 33 FPS on average, with frame rate drops to 28 FPS, the GeForce GTX 1070 is clearly not enough for decent comfort in such a dynamic adventure game.

Owners of 4K monitors are required to use only the most powerful GPUs, starting from the GTX 1080. The top GeForce GTX 1080 Ti from the previous generation showed a decent result with an average of 50 FPS and falls below 42 FPS. Of course, these are not stable 60 FPS at all, but not bad either. For the consistent 60 FPS that the most demanding gamers crave, you need an RTX 2080 or even an RTX 2080 Ti!

At high settings and 4K resolution, the GeForce GTX 1070 and less powerful video cards still do not provide even the minimum sufficient level of performance, already showing less than 30 FPS. Even for undemanding players with monitors of this resolution, only the top-end GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is suitable, showing 47 FPS on average in the absence of frame rate drops below 40 FPS — tolerable, but far from ideal.

Interestingly, even 4K resolution at high settings still does not really reveal the lack of 3 GB of video memory in the younger model GTX 1060 (and 3.5 GB in GTX 970) — the difference in speed between all these models of video cards with different VRAM sizes, although it has increased, but not at times. That is, the lack of video memory, although observed, is not significant.

Comparison in the most difficult conditions we do nominally. It is already clear that even the older model GeForce GTX 1080 Ti could not show the minimum comfortable 40 FPS on average at the minimum 30 FPS, falling to 30 and 25 FPS, respectively, in these difficult conditions. At this rendering speed, it will be uncomfortable to play. The rest of the GeForce generally show slideshows of varying degrees of jerkiness.

The mode simply imposes the most severe requirements both on the power of graphic processors and on the amount of video memory. For the sake of interest, look at the middle peasants — those with 4 and 6 GB of memory provided at least 6-12 FPS, but the GTX 1060 with 3 GB of memory slipped to 1 frame per second! Alas, the game categorically lacks such a volume of video memory. True, the older version of the GTX 1060, its 6 GB is also not particularly helpful.

Conclusion

In terms of graphics quality and technology, Shadow of the Tomb Raider is made at a good modern level, which has always distinguished games in this series. The game looks very good, the locations, models and textures here are mostly well detailed, many modern techniques and post-filters are used in rendering, advanced effects are used, which leads to a very good picture in the end.

In addition, the skillful use of DirectX 12 has led to optimal use of the capabilities of multi-core processors, and a slight emphasis on the processor is observed only at medium settings and the lowest resolution. With more demanding settings for the GPU, the distribution of work between the CPU cores is almost perfect here, which is not so common even among modern games. So the game engine is very good, we are waiting for the promised additional Nvidia techniques and effects to be added.

But even in its current form, Shadow of the Tomb Raider is quite GPU-intensive when it comes to high graphics settings and resolutions. With Full HD, even such a not-so-powerful solution as the GeForce GTX 960 does a good job, providing a playable frame rate at medium settings. But the performance of the game in question depends too much on the rendering resolution, and even in WQHD resolution, players will need solutions at least at the level of the GeForce GTX 1060 or top-end video cards of previous generations, which provide a fairly high smoothness of the video sequence in this case — but only at medium settings.

The most demanding gamers who have monitors with 4K resolution will need a GPU of at least the GeForce GTX 1080 and 1080 Ti, and even better — RTX 2080 (Ti). Only such video cards are able to show a comfortable game in such conditions. The frame rate in the game is extremely dependent on the resolution and in 4K it can seriously load even top-end GPUs. So the developer’s recommendation in the form of a GeForce GTX 1060 is fine, but exactly for Full HD at high settings, and nothing more. Playing in 4K resolution is available only to very wealthy enthusiasts, everyone else will be forced to reduce the rendering resolution and its quality.

As for the processor dependence of the game, despite the extremely high load of the test CPU, this does not mean excessive requirements for its power in any case. It’s just that the game engine is well optimized, and a fast processor will be able to provide even higher frame rates in it. The game is highly desirable at least a mid-range quad-core processor, but the game will also be possible on a less powerful CPU.

Requirements for the amount of RAM and video memory for modern games are typical — the game needs at least 8 GB of system memory (but 16 GB is better), and 3-4 GB of video memory is generally enough, only for high resolution, high settings and anti-aliasing using the SMAA4x method You will need 6-8 GB already. However, in such conditions, a weak GPU will still be the main cause of low performance — before the game runs into a lack of video memory.

We thank the companies that provided the hardware for testing:
ZOTAC International and personally Robert Wislowski
AMD Russia and personally of Ivan Smznev, Familiarity GTX 960 2GBXE 2GBOCE 2GB rich in various game novelties. There were continuations of many well-known series, which pleased with the updated graphics. There are more games that put forward high demands on the volume of the video buffer. Let’s see how this affected the most affordable version of the GeForce GTX 960 with two gigabytes of memory.

In this article we will test the GeForce GTX 960 2GB at standard frequencies and overclocked. Testing will be conducted on the basis of EVGA GeForce GTX 960 SuperSC ACX 2.0+ when the frequencies are reduced to the recommended level and after overclocking. The results are comparable to the performance of the predecessor video adapter GeForce GTX 760 and the older representative of the old guard in the face of the GeForce GTX 780. AMD Radeon R9 will also be present in the comparison.280X, Radeon HD 7970 and Radeon R9 270X. This will allow you to get a general impression of the capabilities of the GeForce GTX 960. As for some modern competitors that are absent in comparison, their results can be compared with other models. For example, the Radeon R9 380 graphics card is close to the Radeon R9 280X. You can also take a look at our first test of the GeForce GTX 960 with a large number of graphics cards and a different set of test applications.

In addition to new games, 3DMark results, Grand Theft Auto 5 and Witcher 3: Wild Hunt have been added to this comparison. The last two games have received several updates since our last test, and AMD and NVIDIA have been diligently optimizing performance in an attempt to achieve better performance with video driver updates. So in the end you can expect better results, especially on AMD Radeon, where the new Crimson drivers should provide good acceleration.

Characteristics of test takers

GeForce GTX 780

GeForce GTX 960

GeForce GTX 760

Radeon R9 280X

Radeon HD 7970

Radeon R9 270X

Architecture

Kepler

Maxwell

Kepler

GCN 1. 0

GCN 1.0

GCN 1.0

GPU codename

GK110

GM206

GK104

Tahiti

Tahiti

Curacao

Number of transistors, million

7100

2940

3500

4313

4313

2800

Technical process, nm

28

28

28

28

28

28

Core area, sq. mm

561

228

294

352

352

212

Number of stream processors

2304

1024

1152

2048

2048

1280

Number of texture units

192

64

96

128

128

80

Number of ROPs

48

32

32

32

32

32

Core frequency*, MHz

863-900

1126-1178

980-1033

1000

925

1050

Memory bus, bit

384

128

256

384

384

256

Memory type

GDDR5

GDDR5

GDDR5

GDDR5

GDDR5

GDDR5

Effective memory frequency, MHz

3072

7010

6008

6000

5500

5600

Memory size, MB

3072

2048

2048

3072

3072

2048

Interface

PCI-E 3. 0

PCI-E 3.0

PCI-E 3.0

PCI-E 3.0

PCI-E 3.0

PCI-E 3.0

TDP level, W

250

120

170

250

250

180

*Base Clock and Boost Clock shown are based on standard specifications

Test Bench

Processor: Intel Core i7-3930K @4.4GHz

motherboard: ASUS Rampage IV Formula

Memory: Kingston KHX2133C11D3K4/16GX, 1866MHz, 4x4GB

hard drive: Hitachi HDS721010CLA332, 1 TB

power supply: Seasonic SS-750KM

operating system: Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 x64

GeForce driver: NVIDIA GeForce 359.06

Driver

Radeon: Crimson Edition 15.11.1 beta

Tested at 1920×1080 resolution. Test applications are in alphabetical order, but 3DMark results are at the top of the list. The testing methodology and settings will be described right before the results. On the charts with the frame rate in games, the minimum fps is indicated on the left, and the average fps on the right.

Test results

3DMark 11

Let’s start with the first 3DMark that supports DirectX 11. The heaviest settings profile, Extreme, offers 1920×1080 resolution. On the right is the total score, on the left is the result of the GPU Score.

At stock frequencies, the GeForce GTX 960 is almost 12% better than the GeForce GTX 760 and only 3% behind the Radeon R9 280X. Overclocking allows you to increase performance by more than 18%.

3 DMark Fire Strike

The most severe Fire Strike test selected from the latest 3DMark. Now the GPU Score is on the right, and the total score is on the left.

Here, the GeForce GTX 960 is not a competitor to the Radeon R9 280X and Radeon HD 7970. But overclocking allows you to reach the level of the older AMD card and even overtake it a little. Also, increased frequencies can reduce the gap with the GeForce GTX 780 to 8%.

Batman : Arkham Knight

This game used a native benchmark, which was repeated 6-7 times for each video card.

Maximum graphics settings, additional effects of improved rain and improved pillars of light are activated.

A significant gap from the GeForce GTX 760 and an impressive gap from the older Radeon. Overclocking allows it to almost match the Radeon R9 280X in terms of average frame rates, but the minimum fps is still lower. And the minimum fps itself grows slightly during overclocking. The reason is the small amount of memory, which limits the potential of the GeForce GTX 960. Learn more about memory usage in our big Batman: Arkham Knight performance test.

Fallout 4

Fallout 4 was tested using Fraps while repeating certain in-game actions. The test walk during which fps was measured is shown below.

Ultra graphics quality selected. Removed the 60 fps cap by editing the iPresentInterval setting in Fallout4Prefs.ini.

The GeForce GTX 960 is about 14% faster than the GeForce GTX 760. At the minimum frame rate, the GeForce GTX 960 is slightly better than the Radeon R9 280X, but weaker in the average. Overclocking gives acceleration up to 17% and allows you to minimize the difference with the GeForce GTX 780. The full version of testing junior and senior video cards in Fallout 4 is available here.

Grand Theft Auto 5

The game has a built-in benchmark, which was used for this test. Based on the data on the average fps of each scene, the average result for the entire benchmark was calculated. The minimum fps was fixed based on the results of the entire benchmark using the Fraps program.

The graphics quality is set to maximum with FXAA anti-aliasing, all parameters are selected in the advanced settings section, but the loading range is increased by only 2 divisions. Read more about the effect of these settings in a dedicated article.

The GeForce GTX 960 once again outperforms the GeForce GTX 760 and Radeon R9 270X, but falls short of the Radeon HD 7970. Overclocking provides a 17% boost to match the performance of the Radeon R9 280X. Moreover, according to the results, there is an advantage in average fps, but in terms of the minimum, the best result is again behind an AMD video card with a large amount of memory.

Just Cause 3

Testing was carried out by replaying the same game episode, data was taken by Fraps. 6-7 repetitions for each video card.

Maximum graphics quality at 1920×1080 with SMAA T2x.

It should be noted that on our GeForce GTX 960 video card in this game there was a local decrease in operating frequencies. It is not entirely clear if these are monitoring problems or if a particular card is not friendly with this game. The nominal result fits into the overall picture, especially when compared with the younger model GeForce GTX 950. But there is no noticeable increase in fps during overclocking. So the final data should be considered as preliminary. But even they show that the performance of the GeForce GTX 960 is close to the Radeon HD 7970 and Radeon R9 280X.

You can also take a look at our full video card comparison test in Just Cause 3.

Mad Max

The episode at the beginning of the game was replayed, the procedure was strictly repeated. 6-7 repetitions were performed for each video card.

Maximum graphics settings at 1920×1080, all effects enabled.

In Mad Max, we see a slight difference with the GeForce GTX 760 at the level of 7-8%. At face value, the GeForce GTX 960 card is close to the Radeon HD 7970, after overclocking it easily overtakes the Radeon R9 280X. Also, increasing the frequencies allows you to reduce the backlog from the GeForce GTX 780 to a few percent.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

The episode at the beginning of the first story mission was replayed. The procedure was repeated, 7 repetitions were performed.

All graphics settings are at maximum. The frame rate is limited to 60 fps, which should be taken into account when comparing results.

Due to the 60 fps limit, the older testers had almost identical average frame rates, close to the available maximum. The minimum fps is more pronounced. According to this parameter, the GeForce GTX 960 is slightly inferior to older AMD competitors, but after overclocking it shows the best results at the level of the GeForce GTX 780. One cannot but note a noticeable gap from the GeForce GTX 760 in Metal Gear Solid 5.

Wasteland 2 Director ‘ s Cut

A 30 second game sequence was replayed. Data was captured using Fraps.

Maximum graphics quality.

In Wasteland 2, the GeForce GTX 760 and GeForce GTX 960 do not show much difference, although the new model is better in terms of minimum fps. And even the advantage over the Radeon R9 270X is noticeably lower than in other games. Frequency boost provided by GeForce GTX 960 increase in results by 18% or more, which allows you to overtake even the Radeon R9 280X in terms of minimum fps.

Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Let’s look at the performance results in last year’s main RPG. Our standard test scene was used.

A specific configuration of settings has been selected in order to achieve an acceptable frame rate while maintaining maximum detail. In the main settings section, HairWorks effects are disabled, the quality of shadows and the amount of grass are lowered to a high level, the rest of the parameters are at maximum. In the post-processing section, only the effects of the glow and rays of light when shading HBAO + are active, the rest of the options are disabled. Read more about the graphics features and settings of Witcher 3 in our dedicated article.

Huge lead over GeForce GTX 760 by up to 35% in average frame rate. At the same time, the GeForce GTX 960 confidently outperforms all competitors from AMD, although the advantage over the Radeon R9 280X is only a few percent. Overclocking strengthens the position and allows you to overtake the GeForce GTX 780.

Conclusions

The results show that the GeForce GTX 960 still copes well with modern games in Full HD mode. If in some cases the video card is experiencing difficulties, but a slight adjustment of the settings allows you to achieve an acceptable result. Overall performance close to Radeon R9280X, although the opponent is slightly better in most cases. Overclocking easily compensates for this, allowing you to achieve an overwhelming advantage over the Radeon R9 280X with factory frequencies. These results are valid for a simple version of the GeForce GTX 960 with 2 GB of video memory. And this amount of memory in modern games is sometimes not enough. And this is clearly seen from the difference in the minimum fps relative to Radeon video cards with 3 GB. So the transfer of the GeForce GTX 960 to 4 GB of memory is fully justified, the performance of such video cards will be higher. It’s nice to note that in some GeForce GTX 9 applications60 after overclocking is at the level of the GeForce GTX 780. Such an achievement is impressive, but a caveat is required that we are talking about the reference version of the GeForce GTX 780 with a floating frequency in Boost mode. And the old model still has a lot of potential for overclocking. Therefore, the individual successes of the GeForce GTX 960 against the backdrop of a 384-bit old-generation top-level card do not underestimate the capabilities of the GeForce GTX 780.

More in this category:

« Testing the video card ASUS GeForce GTX 980 Matrix Platinum

Testing and review of the GeForce GTX 950 by MSI »

Review of the video card ASUS GeForce GTX 960 STRIX GreenTech_Reviews

Review and testing of the video card ASUS GeForce GTX 960 STRIX

What does a gamer expect from his personal computer? Of course, to be highly productive. And, at the same time, not very expensive. It’s hard to choose something, isn’t it? But there is another important criterion — the noise emitted by the cooling systems of the components. Of course, there are no problems with case fans for a long time. With processors, in general, too. And with video cards it’s not so simple. Reference turbines are overwhelmingly noisy when the GPU is warmed up above 70-80 degrees. Solutions from manufacturers are much quieter and more efficient. But there is one caveat — in the absence of a load on the video card, the fans continue to work and, most likely, make some noise. After all, it would be much better if the video card was completely silent. ASUS has long introduced the STRIX series to the market, which includes not only gaming peripherals, but also video cards of both the middle class and the most productive ones.

The heroine of this review is the GeForce GTX 960 STRIX video card, which we will thoroughly study today!

The full name of the model is STRIX-GTX960-DC2OC-2GD5, which encodes the main information about the video card — it belongs to the STRIX series, is based on the GTX 960 graphics processor, has a DirectCU2 cooling system, has already been overclocked by the manufacturer, and 2 GB of GDDR5 video memory.

On the front side there is an image of an owl-robot, well known to us from previous STRIX video cards. Here, the manufacturer decided to demonstrate the scheme of the cooling system.

On the back of the box, the company introduces us to the principle of operation of the STRIX video card cooling system and explains what 0 dB FAN is. The meaning of the technology is that the fans are completely stopped until the GPU temperature exceeds 65 degrees. A place is also given to a description of a set of high-quality electronic components called Super Alloy Power and proprietary software ASUS GPU Tweak

The delivery set is put away in a small box with the ASUS logo.

Inside are:
— CD with drivers and software;
— user manual;
— branded sticker STRIX;
— DVI -> VGA adapter for connecting a monitor.

When looking at the video card from above, the outlines of the owl are immediately visible (it is in her honor that the product line is called — STRIX).

Even taking into account the middle class of the graphics processor, the video card from ASUS received a metal backplate covering almost the entire printed circuit board.

ASUS and STRIX logos flaunt on the backplate and on the plastic housing of the cooling system.

The following interfaces for connecting monitors are available to the user:
— one DVI-I;
— one HDMI 2.0;
— three Display Ports.

An SLI configuration can only be assembled from two such video cards — there is only one corresponding connector.

As you have already noticed, the dimensions of the video card are slightly increased by the cooling system. The card itself is small, the graphics processor does not consume very much power, so only one 6-pin cable is required to power it.

The cooling system has four copper nickel-plated heat pipes — a pair with a diameter of 8 mm and a pair of 6 mm.

A small part of the heatsink protrudes from the PCB, so some of the warm air will flow into the area of the processor and RAM.

The radiator is blown by a pair of 74 mm fans from FirstDo, model — FD7010h22S.

The GPU is only in contact with two heatpipes, but both are 8mm.

View of the heatsink from above without the plastic housing.

The backplate contacts only one electronic component through a soft thermal pad.

Well, here we come to the board itself.

The power subsystem is cooled by a small black aluminum radiator.

It contacts the mosfets through soft thermal pads.

The GPU power subsystem has four phases, and one more for the memory.

The uP1608TK controller controls the voltage to the GPU.

For similar action for memory — uP1959R.

It is noteworthy that three sites are prepared for video memory, and only two microcircuits are used.

Two more memory chips are located on the opposite side of the PCB.

All chips are labeled Samsung K4G1325FC-HC28.

Test

Test bench:
— Intel Core i7-4770K @ 4.5 GHz
— ASUS Maximus VI Extreme
— Crucial Ballistix Tactical Tracer BLT4G3D1869DT2TXOB (2x 4 GB, 1866 MHz, 9-9-9-27)
— ASUS ROG RAIDR Express SSD 240 GB
— Fractal Design Newton R3 1000W (White, 80+ Platinum)

Information from the GPU-Z utility. Core frequency — 1253 (in Boost — 1317) MHz, memory — 1800 (7200) MHz. In fact, the frequency in Boost can reach 1404 MHz.

It was possible to overclock the video card to 1353 (in Boost — 1417) MHz on the core and up to 1900 (7600) MHz from memory. In test packages and games, the core frequency reached 1504 MHz.