Nor does it need to be, since the 960 is only a few months old, and was the first card to offer Maxwell’s GM206 incarnation. The impact of that is minimal the GTX 960 quotes 112GB/s of memory bandwidth, while the GTX 950 serves up 105.6.Īs the specifications make clear, the GTX 950 is not a dramatic departure from previous Nvidia architectures. While the amount of memory and width of the interface is identical to the GTX 960, the memory clock has pulled back from 7GHz to 6.6GHz. Compared to the GTX 960, the number of CUDA cores has been cut from 1,024 to 768, texture units have dropped from 64 to 48, and the stock base clock speed has been reduced from 1,126MHz to 1,024MHz. The differences are what you’d expect when a new chip is derived from another, quicker component. Both the 960 and 950 have 32 Render Output Units (ROPs), both have a 128-bit memory interface, both offer two gigabytes of GDDR5 memory, and both provide DirectX 12 feature level 12.1 support. The similarity is evident in several specifications. It is part of the second-generation Maxwell family, and in fact has the same basic GM206 GPU. In brief, the GTX 950 can be described as the GTX 960’s little brother.
Unlike AMD, which re-brands and slashes the price of older GPUs to create budget offerings, Nvidia is using its latest architecture, known as Maxwell, to back the 950. With prices starting at $160, the card is Nvidia’s response to AMD’s recently released R7 370, a card that typically sells at an identical price. Its current entry-level card, the GTX 750 Ti, is now over a year old, and there’s a big hole in the company’s line-up between it and the $200 GTX 960. Yet the company has arguably struggled when forced to limbo its price lower. Nvidia has a long history of producing excellent cards for around $200 that can be traced back to the 8800 GT, an affordable choice that was able to play many games of the era at 2,560 x 1,600 resolution (back then, 16:9 was not the go-to form factor). Humble but capable budget cards represent what the bulk of gamers actually use. Spending several hundred dollars (or more) on a video card is never easy to justify. High-end video cards like Nvidia’s GTX 980 Ti and AMD’s Radeon Fury X are what many gamers aspire to, but the fact they’re aspirational means they’re not what most gamers actually purchase.
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