Today Nvidia has pulled the wraps off its all-new GTX 960 video card, the latest addition to its lineup of Maxwell GPUs. At $200 MSRP, it sits directly in-between the upper and lower tiers of the Nvidia product stack—and offers all the features of the more expensive cards while costing almost half the price. In other words, this is the card for 1080p gaming at 60fps at an affordable price.

If that doesn’t sound good enough, the GTX 960 is also designed to be overclocked higher than any card that has come before it, and it’s releasing along with a new GeForce graphics driver and a new version of GeForce Experience that lets you enable some Maxwell features a bit easier than in the past. It’s a hard launch for the GTX 960, instead of a paper launch, so by the time you read this, cards will be available from all the usual suspects (Asus, Gigabyte, etc.) at retail and online.

GTX 960 GTX 760 GTX 660 Architecture Maxwell Kepler Kepler CUDA cores 1024 1152 960 Memory 2GB 2GB 2GB Base clock 1126MHz 980 980 Boost clock 1178MHz 1033MHz 1033MHz Memory clock 7GHz 6GHz 6GHz Memory bus 128-bit 192-bit 192-bit TDP 120W 170W 140W Power connector One 6-pin Two 6-pin One 6-pin Connectors DVI, HDMI, 3x DisplayPort DVI-I, DVI-D, HDMI,



DisplayPort DVI-I, DVI-D, HDMI,



DisplayPort

The Test Subjects

For those who might not follow this stuff super closely, Nvidia’s GTX 900-series cards are the successors its 600- and 700-series cards, which were based on the Kepler architecture. Even though Maxwell GPUs are built on the same 28nm technology as Kepler, they offer much greater efficiency due to architecture improvements and maturity of the technology. These advancements allow Maxwell cards to run cooler and quieter than their Kepler-based predecessors, while delivering higher performance. So far Nvidia has released three previous Maxwell GPUs: the entry-level GTX 750Ti (based on first-generation Maxwell architecture), and then the flagship GTX 980 and the high-end GTX 970 (based on second-generation Maxwell architecture). The GTX 960 slides directly into the middle of this GPU sandwich as a mid-range GPU for 1080p gaming, and replaces the GTX 760 in the company’s lineup.Unlike the previously released GTX 980 and 970 cards, the GTX 960 is based on an all-new chunk of silicon named GM206. The GPU’s design is exactly the same as the GTX 980 and GTX 970, only slightly neutered in terms of specs (not features) to hit a lower price point. In terms of specs, the GTX 960 is rocking 1024 CUDA cores, 2GB of GDDR5 memory at 7Gbps, and has a TDP of just 120W via a single six-pin power connector. For comparison, the GTX 660 it replaces has a TDP of 140W, yet the GTX 960 is 50% faster, despite sucking 20W less juice overall. Its base clock speed is 1126MHz, and its boost clock is 1178MHz.Nvidia says this new GPU has a revamped memory subsystem to help increase efficiency, so that even though it uses a 128-bit interface (which is a relatively narrow pipe for data, by today’s standards), it’s still faster than the GTX 660 it replaces (despite the latter's 192-bit memory bus). The GTX 960 also uses memory clocked at 7Gbps as opposed to the 6Gbps modules used in previous x60 cards.The GTX 960 will support all the high-end features found in previous upper-crust Maxwell GPUs, including Voxel Global Illumination (VXGI), as well as Multi-Frame Anti-Aliasing (MFAA) and Dynamic Super Resolution (DSR) for those who hate jaggies in their games. It also supports G-Sync technology too, but you'll need to buy a monitor that supports this tech that eliminates screen tearing. So despite its affordable nature, the GTX 960 hasn’t been crippled at all—in fact, the GTX 960 actually supports one specific technology that is limited in the flagship GTX 980, and that's the ability to both encode and decode H.265 video. The GTX 980 only allows for encode, not decode, so the GTX 960 has the advantage in this realm. The GTX 960 also supports HDCP 2.2, which is something else not supported by the GTX 980. Here's a quick chart to see how the 960 compares to older GPUs.There won’t be a reference GTX 960 card that you can buy, so when you go shopping you'll see a variety of offerings from manufacturers (e.g., Asus, EVGA, Gigabyte, Zotac). These cards will vary in terms of clock speeds, cooling setups, price tags, and so forth. We got our hands on cards from Asus and EVGA, and both are highly overclocked. Let's take a look at each card:

Asus Strix 960 DirectCU II

<em>The Asus DC2 card is so quiet you can barely tell it’s operating.</em>

This card is factory overclocked, so it sports a base clock of 1291MHz and a boost clock of 1317MHz. Its memory is also juiced to 7.2GHz right out of the box. Asus claims it runs approximately 30% cooler than a "stock" cooler design, and offers around 12% more performance too; if you like to coax more out of your video cards, though, the Strix comes with a tuning utility called GPU Tweak. One crazy feature of this card, and a testament to the insane efficiency of Maxwell, is that below 55°C the card's fans won't even spin.

EVGA GTX 960 SSC

<em>The EVGA version gets the fancy new ACX 2.0 cooler (insert oohing and ahhing here).</em>

The Cold, Hard Numbers

Asus Strix 960 DC2 EVGA GTX 960 SSC EVGA GTX 660 SC Nvidia GTX 660

Reference Card Radeon R9 285 EVGA GTX 970 Driver 347.25 347.25 347.25 347.25 14.12 Catalyst 347.25 Max Temp (°C) 59° 68° 69° 74° 62° 71° 3DMark 6953 6751 4514 4534 6641 9916 Unigine Heaven 4.0 (4xAA) 40.5 40.3 29 28.4 39 65.4 Unigine Heaven 4.0 (8xAA) 34.3 33.8 25.3 24.4 33.4 55.6 Batman: Arkham Origins (4xAA) 51 50 59 59 73 73 Batman: Arkham Origins (8xAA) 42 40 43 40 58 60 Hitman: Absolution (4xAA) 41.7 40.85 35.62 34.84 48.59 64 Hitman: Absolution (8xAA) 30.6 30.09 24.14 23.76 31.86 50 Metro: Last Light 34.33 33.67 22 21.3 52 48.3 Tomb Raider 32.2 31.4 19.4 19.1 28 49.6

<em>Both GTX 960 cards we tested ran at 1.5GHz, no problemo.</em>

Final Thoughts

The EVGA card is not just overclocked, but Super Superclocked. This translates into a base clock of 1279MHz and a boost clock of 1342MHz. It also sports an all-new ACX 2.0 design on the cooling tip, and an eight-pin power connector (two more pins than stock and the Asus card). Similar to the Asus card, the fans stop spinning when the card is idle and temps are below 60°C. It includes tuning software named PrecisionX.[Our test bed was a 4.0GHz Core i7-4790K in a Gigabyte G1.Sniper M5 motherboard with 8GB of DDR3/1600 and an Enermax 530W PSU; the case was left with its sides removed. The OS was 64-bit Windows 7 Professional. All games were run at 1920x1080. Anti-aliasing settings are listed above as applicable; all other graphical settings were set to their maximum.]According to Nvidia, the GTX 960 does not replace the Kepler-based GTX 760, but rather the Kepler-based GTX 660, which came out over two years ago (September 2012). Therefore, we've convened a mini-summit of $200 GPUs, including two GTX 960 cards, two GTX 660 cards, and their natural predator, the AMD Radeon R9 285. We threw in a GTX 970 for comparison as well. To give you a sense of just how the cards perform when striving for maximum image quality, we enabled anti-aliasing in addition to cranking up all graphical settings as high as they would go for our benchmarks—but as we stated above, you can indeed game at 1080p/60fps if you leave off AA. (For example, on the Asus Strix, running Tomb Raider with everything maxed but no AA got 59.7fps; Hitman scored 72.67; and Batman: Arkham Origins scored 120fps.)Looking at the numbers, you can see the GTX 960 is extremely well-matched compared to the Radeon R9 285. In tests that don't make excessive use of Nvidia's proprietary PhysX technology, such as Batman and Metro, the GTX 960 is extremely closely matched with the much higher-spec'd Radeon card. They are so close, in fact, that it’s impossible to say one model is faster than the other by any significant margin. The fact that the delta between the Nvidia and AMD camps is so small is a bit surprising, since the R9 285 has 1792 stream processors (the GTX 960 has 1024 CUDA cores), a 256-bit memory bus (the GTX 960's is 128-bit), and a TDP of 190W (compared to just 120W for the GTX 960). Given its specs, the GTX 960 punches way above its weight class.Also, even though the GTX 960 is neck-and-neck with the R9 285 in terms of sheer horsepower, one area in which it blows the AMD card out of the water is its ability to run cool and quiet, even while massively overclocked. For example, the Radeon R9 285 card is generally "audible" under load, and while it's not annoyingly loud, we were definitely aware of the fact that a GPU with spinning fans was operating our testing rig. Also, the R9 285 we used ran at 918MHz under load, and hit about 62°C.In comparison, both of the GTX 960 cards we tested were absolutely silent. Heck, neither of them even had their fans spinning until a few minutes into the benchmark. Plus, the two GTX 960 cards we tested were both comfortable running at about 1.5GHz clock speed, which is unheard of for a GPU using stock air-cooling and without adding extra voltage. Even at these sky-high clocks, the cards are still silent.Overall, the GTX 960 delivers on its promise of being a heck of a lot faster than the aging GTX 660, while also running cool and extremely quiet. It offers a surprising combination of impressive overclockability and silent operation that I haven’t seen before. For gaming, it has enough horsepower to play current titles at decent framerates, and should also be powerful enough to run less demanding titles at downsampled-4K (via Nvidia’s DSR feature) for super-sharp image quality. Nvidia says it's the ultimate card for League of Legends, as it can be run at 4K, but we did not test this. If you’re running a GTX 660 or older GPU, it's a solid upgrade. We prefer it over the equally priced R9 285, primarily because it's cooler and quieter.

Josh is a crazy cat lady who has covered PC hardware for more years than he cares to rattle off. Check out his cat pics on Instagram