Asus and EVGA represent, plus DSR and VSR benchmarks
One of the nice things about PCs is that your budget has a wide range of entry points. If you don't need the heavy lifting of an Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 or an AMD Radeon R9 290X, you don't have to cough up hundreds of dollars for one. Both companies offer a variety of stuff to fit your budget. Historically, Nvidia's cards ending in "60" -- like the 560, 660 and 760 – have offered performance in between the premium cards and the more economical choices, putting them in a "Goldilocks zone" of balanced price and performance. Nvidia's latest, the GTX 960 is no exception. With a 128-bit memory bus, a little over a thousand shader cores, and 2GB of VRAM, it's not designed to be a giant leap over the GTX 660. But it's not designed to be modest, either.
Let's take a look at the Asus Strix DirectCU II OC Edition of the GTX 960. (EVGA sent us a "Super Superclocked" version that uses the company's ACX 2.0 cooler, but Nvidia distributed the Asus card as the official one to test for review, so we'll talk about the Asus card first.) This mouthful of a card comes overclocked out of the box, and the company claims a 12% average increase in performance, versus Nvidia's stock or "reference" model. It features dual fans sitting on top of heatsinks that are fed by several heatpipes, and these fans are designed to not spin until the GPU core gets up to 65 degrees Celsius. When it does, the Strix fans are designed to operate quietly, yet still run the chip cooler than the stock version can. About 30% cooler, in fact.
The company also asserts that its cards will be free of coil whine, which is an annoying high-pitched squeal that some faulty electronics can emit, even when there are no moving parts. This is most commonly seen in power supplies but sometimes happens in video cards too. Since Asus says that their cards are free of this defect, it indicates that you can get a replacement if your card falls victim, rather than it being an issue that they can squirrel out of. It's nice to see a company willing to address this issue. The cards also come with a 1-year "Premium" subscription to the Xsplit game broadcasting service, which lets you to stream your gaming online. That would usually cost you over a hundred bucks.
Next up is the EVGA SSC version that we mentioned earlier. This one is a bit longer than the Asus card, taping out at 10 inches or so, versus about 8.5 inches. But its height barely rises above the bracket, so the screw will be easier to install in a cramped space. The EVGA card also does not have a backplate, but it also costs a few bucks less. Notably, this SSC version uses an 8-pin PCI Express cable, instead of 6 pins on the Asus card. That means that it could pull up to 225 watts instead of 150, hypothetically giving it a higher overclock ceiling. Its dual fans are also a bit larger, at 90mm versus 70mm. The SSC also uses a copper plate on top of the GPU core, which can move heat faster than the partly aluminum plate on the Asus card. However, the Asus MOSFET chips have small heatsinks attached with thermal pads, whereas the EVGA card's MOSFETs are sitting underneath a metal plate that runs the length of the card. In our exprience, heatsinks generally perform better than plates.
Considering the relatively low amount of power that these cards draw, however, the differences in cooling design may not matter that much. EVGA claims that its straight heat pipes cool 6% than the kind of bent heat pipes that the Asus card uses. What kind of gaming should you expect, though, with the 960's architecture?
Let's take a look at the spec charts:
| GTX 960 | GTX 970 | GTX 660
| R9 285
| R9 290
|
| Generation | GM206 | GM204 | GK106 | Tonga | Hawaii |
| Core Clock (MHz) | 1228 | 1050 | 980 | 928 | 947 |
| Boost Clock (MHz) | 1291 | 1178 | 1033 | ~1GHz | ~1GHz |
| VRAM Clock (MHz) | 7010 | 7000 | 6000 | 5500 | 5000 |
| VRAM Amount | 2GB | 4GB | 2GB/3GB | 2GB | 4GB |
| Bus | 128-bit | 256-bit | 192-bit | 256-bit | 512-bit |
| ROPs | 32 | 64 | 24 | 32 | 64 |
| TMUs | 64 | 104 | 80 | 112 | 160 |
| Shaders | 1024 | 1664 | 960 | 1792 | 2560 |
| SMs | 8 | 13 | 5 | N/A | N/A |
| TDP (watts) | 120 | 145 | 140 | 190 | 275 |
| Street Price | $210 | $330 | $150 | $200 | $250 |
The GTX 960 price and clock speeds noted here are specifically for the Asus Strix version. (Update: Asus tells us that the MSRP of their card changed this morning from $215 to $210.) The EVGA SSC card has a launch price of $210, and Nvidia expects the average launch price across all cards to be closer to $200. The Asus card also has an "OC mode" setting that increases its core clock speed to 1253MHz and its boost clock to 1317MHz. The default clock speeds of the GTX 960 are 1126MHz and and 1178MHz, respectively, so it's a sizeable jump.
It's been a while since we've seen a mid-range gaming card with only a 128-bit memory bus. The GTX 660 was 192-bit, and the 560 was 256-bit. Nvidia tells us that its Maxwell chips use particularly good data compression techniques to effectively increase the bus speed, though. Nvidia has also said in the past that the shader cores in this new Maxwell generation of GPUs are up to 40% faster than the ones that Kepler (the GTX 660) uses. In fact, EVGA says that its GTX 960 is up to 60% faster than a GTX 660. Still, 1024 shader cores doesn't seem like a lot. The 960 has half the shader cores of the GTX 980, half its memory bandwidth, and half its VRAM. But it still supports MFAA, VXGI, Dynamic Super Resolution, and DirectX 12. So its added feature set alone is compelling, even if it turns out to be "only" 30% faster than a GTX 660. The 960s are also launching at a lower price than the 660 and 760. (We're not putting the 760 or 770 cards in the spec chart because they are just refinements of the 670 and 680, respectively.)
Our test rig is as follows:
| Part | Component |
| CPU | Intel Core i7-3960X (at stock clock speeds; 3.3GHz base, 3.9GHz turbo) |
| CPU Cooler | Corsair Hydro Series H100 |
| Mobo | Asus Rampage IV Extreme |
| RAM | 4x 4GB G.Skill Ripjaws X, 2133MHz CL9 |
| Power Supply | Corsair AX1200 (1,200 watts) |
| SSD | 1TB Crucial M550 |
| OS | Windows 8.1 |
| Case | NZXT Phantom 530 |
Armed with this knowledge, let's see how the GTX 960 stacks up. All of these games were tested at or near their highest settings, with 4xMSAA. What do we mean by "near"? For example, we turned off PhysX so as not to tilt the score too much in Nvidia's favor, and we turned off TressFX so that AMD could not tilt either. We did not use Nvidia's proprietary TXAA or MFAA either. Just straight-up 4xMSAA. (Tomb Raider does not have an MSAA setting, so we used 2xSSAA instead.) Lastly, we set the texture quality in Shadow of Mordor to medium, since the game itself says that higher settings are not intended for video cards that have less than 3GB of VRAM. Both the GTX 960 and the R9 285 have 2GB (though we may see 4GB versions later on). We wanted to look at GPU performance without the result being colored too much by brand-specific extensions. Our mix of games is intended to be a balance of Nvidia-friendly titles and AMD-friendly titles. We used these games' built-in benchmarks to conduct all tests, to keep the evaluated input the same each time.
First off, here's the results at 1920x1080, which Nvidia considers the target resolution for the GTX 960. We're using the Asus Strix version of the GTX 960, since it's more or less the officially approved one. The R9 285 is a Sapphire ITX Compact version; the GTX 660 is an MSI Frozr II; the GTX 970 is an Asus Mini; and the R9 290 is the reference model.
1920x1080 Bechmark Results, Average Frames Per Second
| GTX 960 | GTX 660 | GTX 970 | R9 285 | R9 290 |
| Tomb Raider | 90 | 65 | 135 | 85 | 126 |
| Metro: Last Light | 53 | 37 | 72 | 53 | 72 |
| Batman: Arkham Origins | 67 | 66 | 102 | 75 | 103 |
| Hitman: Absolution | 39 | 33 | 61 | 47 | 63 |
| Shadow of Mordor | 53 | 37 | 78 | 56 | 80 |
| 3DMark 2013 (score) | 6977 | 4854 | 9762 | 6891 | 9435 |
As we can see, the GTX 960's relatively narrow memory bus does not appear to be the obstacle that we feared. In fact, the card edges out the R9 285 in Tomb Raider, a game that is customarily in AMD's camp. However, AMD seems to have found some optimizations in its new Omega drivers elsewhere, and the R9 285 overtakes the GTX 960 in Batman Arkham Origins, a game that usually favors Nvidia gear by a healthy margin. The 960's performance there is a bit puzzling (since it pretty much matches that of the 660), but the score did not budge after several re-tests. The R9 290, meanwhile, quietly keeps pace with the GTX 970, falling short only in Tomb Raider. Before AMD released its Omega drivers, you could expect the 290 to be 5-10% slower across the board, but it looks like this is no longer the case.
Overall, the GTX 960 and R9 285 cards do quite respectably at 1920x1080, with each game's visual settings cranked up. So everything is working by design.
Both GTX 960s are also very quiet cards. You have to look at the fans to know they're spinning, because you'll probably never hear them. The EVGA SSC card uses one 8-pin PCI Express cable instead of a 6-pin, but Nvidia tells us that this is for higher overclock potential, not because of a higher power requirement. The card never cracked 70 degrees Celsius during our tests, and the Asus card ran in the low 60s. The 285, for its part, operated in the high 60s.
Next up, we're taking DSR and VSR for a spin. DSR stands for Dynamic Super Resolution. Technically, this uses ordered-grid super-sample anti-aliasing with a 13-tap Gaussian filter. In more straightforward terms, DSR takes a higher resolution than your monitor can display, squishes it down to fit, and applies a filter to enhance smoothness on the edges of objects in the game world. It can scale up to 3840x2160, also known as "4K," and can stop at points in between, such as 2560x1440. A 1440p monitor has roughly 80% more pixels than a 1080p monitor, and it's a common resolution for gamers with deeper pockets.
This next set of benchmarks is run using the same 1080p monitor as before, just with DSR and VSR applied. We couldn't get either resolution tech to work correctly with Shadow of Morder, however; it ran at 2880x1620 instead, which is exactly twice as many pixels as 1920x1080. So the performance there will be a little lower than someone with a 1440p monitor should expect.
2560x1440 Benchmark Results (via DSR and VSR), Average FPS
| GTX 960 | GTX 660 | GTX 970 | R9 285 | R9 290 |
| Tomb Raider | 55 | 37 | 80 | 54 | 80 |
| Metro: Last Light | 34 | 23 | 47 | 34 | 48 |
| Batman: Arkham Origins | 45 | 36 | 68 | 51 | 75 |
| Hitman: Absolution | 23 | 17 | 39 | 30 | 50 |
| Shadow of Mordor* | 30 | 25 | 44 | 33 | 44 |
*2880x1620 resolution
Despite the much higher bandwidth requirements, Nvidia's GTX 960 scales up quite respectably (as does the comparable Radeon R9 285). Hitman: Absolution continues to be a thorn in Nvidia's side, but the 960 meets the R9 285 blow-for-blow. The R9 290 is looking pretty good once more, losing surprisingly little steam in Hitman: Absolution and running in stride with the GTX 970, even pushing decisively ahead of it in Hitman and Batman.
Since we acquired two GTX 960s for this review, it would be a shame not to try them in SLI. We had two R9 285s on hand anyway, so we'd have to hand in our geek cards if we didn't give Crossfire a shot as well. The video cards are not identical in either case, but that's not necessary to get SLI or Crossfire to work. The cards just both need to be 960s or 285s. The one wrinkle is that the higher-clocked card will reduce its speed to match that of the lower-clocked card. So your results with identical pairs will be slightly different from what we got. Since SLI and CF don't add RAM together (the contents just get mirrored), Shadow of Mordor will remain running with "Medium" textures.
For these benches, we paired our Sapphire R9 285 Compact with an Asus Strix R9 285. These cards in SLI/CF would be overkill for 1080p, so we focused on repeating our 1440p test set instead. 3DMark remained at 1920x1080, however. We wanted to make direct comparisons between this set of 3DMark score and the earlier set.
SLI and Crossfire (via DSR and VSR), Average FPS
| GTX 960 SLI | R9 285 CF |
| Tomb Raider | 102 | 64 |
| Metro: Last Light | 55 | 57 |
| Batman: Arkham Origins | 78 | 94 |
| Hitman: Absolution | 39 | 56 |
| Shadow of Mordor* | 52 | 54 |
| 3DMark 2013 (score) | 11,173 | 11,531 |
*2880x1620 resolution
The 285s in Crossfire didn't seem to like Tomb Raider and remained locked at 64 FPS throughout the test. No amount of fiddling seemed to fix it. We know that it was detecting the card, because we were getting higher performance than would be possible with just one 285. The GTX 960's performance in Batman is also a bit puzzling. We'll have to dig into both of these issues further. Other than that, the 285 and 960 both scale pretty well when paired with a buddy, though the 285 indicates better scaling overall in the games that correctly recognized the second card. The GTX 960 does really well with Tomb Raider, though. Given the 285's performance elsewhere, we doubt that it would pull ahead here. The picture might change at 4K, but this tier of card is not advisable for resolutions that high anyway. We'd recommend at least two GTX 970s or two Radeon R9 290s.
At around $250, though, the R9 290 is not a bad choice, if you can stretch your budget a little. But we'd recommend a 600-watt power supply for a single 290, and an 850-watt PSU for two of them, so there may be additional costs involved. The GTX 960, meanwhile, is rated for a 400-watt PSU, so it can plug into a wide range of systems without needing additional upgrades. The 290 also does not do 4K VSR, maxing out instead at 3200x1800, because it uses the older Hawaii core instead of the newer Tonga core. The 960 and the 285 can go all the way. And definitely do not get the black-and red "reference" version of the 290 with the single fan. It runs really loudly. A better choice would be the Sapphire Tri-X model, or the Gigabyte GV-R929WF3-4GD. Both choices need a good 12 inches of space inside your case, though. If you have a mini-ITX case and want something both compact and beefy, Gigabyte and Asus both make shorty GTX 970s (and of course there's the compact Sapphire 285 that we used for this review).
If you're a fan of the Green Team and have been holding off for a Maxwell card at this price point, Nvidia has delivered -- though AMD is no pushover, thanks in part to the optimizations in its new Omega drivers.
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