It wouldn't be such a bad card if it didn't have a price premium of 200 bucks. And don't get me started because of "muh power efficiency, only uses a few watts". So what its power efficient? Do you want to buy a 200 bucks gpu and get gimped in performance for those -80 watts?
980 and 970 were and still best gpus, in my opinion even ever made. That lead the path to 960 open, if 960 would go like 970, it would have been killer GPU that probably wouldn eliminate all competition. I do think nvidia knew it, obviously and they up to something.
They gimped it too much IMHO. It should at least perform as well as the GTX 770, but it doesn't. It hardly manages a 10 frame average improvement over my GPU, a 760. That's sad.
You said it. I only cared about power usuage on my second rig cause its a server/steam game streaming rig. So its a 80w x5630 with a 105w? gtx 650ti. Thats all that is needed for high settings for 1080p. GTX 960 is a decent upgrade for that pc but not my main rig. This would have been a good card if was called the gtx 950ti imho @ $125-$150 ish
Indeed, it barely manages 10% performance increase VS my 660ti. That's not much progress.... The 660ti had a 30% to 40% advantage compared to the 560ti, this card is gimped to the max.
not even close. there's been many better gpus in the past. not taking anything away from the 970, it's a great performer on the cheap. the 980 for example is far less attractive and it doesn't even come anywhere near my top 50 gpus of all times. it's overpriced. 960 is a trolling attempt from nvidia. it's as simple as that. I had 2x 7950 for a year or so... got rid of them, gave them away. these gpus performed on par with this new 960. but they had more vram. And I gave them away both because I thought they were worthless. This should be a £99.99 gpu. not a penny more. It'll be there, price wise before the summer arrives.
Seems pretty clear they are trying to create a wider gap between the 60 and 70 series this time around to push more buyers over to the 70 series. Seems like it's going to work too. If I were in the market for $250 or less, I would wait it out, or save more for a 970. Not really impressed with the performance.
I remember a while back one of their people was saying he expected the average price paid for a graphics card to go up slightly over the next few years. I think some people got all agro over it thinking he was saying Nvidia was going to raise their prices. Then the 970 came out and everyone forgot all about that.
I think its OK, the problem is that the two previous releases both were something special, the 750Ti had unprecedented efficiency, matching AMD cards at half the power, the 980 took the single GPU performance crown while the 970 offered a huge performance boost at a low price. The 960 by contrast, is just a modest performance bump with a modest price drop compared to its predecessor, the fact that pretty much everyone knew the specs before launch didnt help either, launch day came, and contrary to the previous two nvidia launches, there wasnt anything surprising to find out. That said, i do dislike the european prices, but that goes for all GPUs really, imho prices need to drop below €200 here for it to be an interesting card for me.
I agree with lot's of people here. Not a very good card for the money. First thing i care about is performance then power efficiency. Although it's impressive the performance vs power in my opinion the whole 900 is all about power efficiency and less about performance. i was disappointed to see the 900 series only slightly better than 700 series. i will be waiting for the next Nvidia cards to come before upgrading or maybe wait for AMD to see what they can do but I'm not in the mood to go for AMD again after all the issues I had. I had Nvidia before and never had the kind of issues I had now and also done with multi gpu setups until they can prove that every game supports sli/crossfire with great latency and so on.
This sums up my take. I have thought of the idea of getting off of my 7950 because it gets a little noisy, want something quieter. I am torn between a 970 (KFA2 Infinity) or a 290X (Vapor X), but after seeing this I may just hold off altogether another generation. What I have now pretty much ties it, and what I have seen in reviews on TPU is that in games I would play (Last Light, Shadow of Mordor) my card which I guess is around 280X performance wins. I was hoping this card would fall just below a 290, seeing as a 290X is par with a 970. Looks like Nvidia has stopped my upgrade itch, its not worth my investment at the moment til AMD launch their new GPUs. EDIT - Oh and my vote for best GPU ever is the Ti4200
One of the options in the poll should have been "Are you buying one". This is the category I fall into as I have a couple on the way. I don't think the card will have world beating performance but it will be ok. I may even pair a GTX 960 up with one of my 5960Xs and beat a few people on the benchmarks.
And of the PR of the gtx660/750ti. It doesn´t do any justice to those cards, those had plenty of a buffer for their time, this one has a 1/3 of what we will need very soon. I can´t think of a reason to squeeze their mid-range customers so much other than nvidia is anticipating some financial trouble.
looking at a price to power the gtx 960 is not doing so well. NCIX.COM current sale price in Canadian 1/24/2015: cheapest GTX 970 is from PNY ($379.99) cheapest R9 290X is from Powercolor ($309.99) cheapest R9 290 is from Gigabyte ($279.99) cheapest GTX 760 is from Zotac ($223.98) cheapest R9 285 is from Gigabyte ($239.99) cheapest GTX 660 is from MSI ($119.99) cheapest GTX 960 is from Gigabyte ($219.99) so for $40 dollars more you could get a R9 290 and a better gaming device (yes using more watts)