14 DAY TRIAL // The GeForce GTX 960 graphics card from NVIDIA is expected to make its formal debut on January 22, 2015, which means that we still have nearly a week to wait. That hasn't stopped people from leaking all relevant data though.
Just yesterday we found out what the performance specifications of the Maxwell-based video card would be. Now, we get to see just how those specs translate into performance.
Admittedly, benchmarks might not be a truly flawless means of gauging the performance of a video board. Same for CPUs. Basically, real world performance can be affected by various things.
Still, no one ever came up with something better than benchmark suites for when it comes to measuring performance of video cards.
The benchmark results for NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960
The board was not factory overclocked too much when put through the wringer, for the most part, but it's still not the reference board, so the numbers will be a bit inflated.
An Intel Core i7-4770K central processing unit was used as the central driver of the test bench computer, running at 4.5 GHz.
When subjected to the performance and extreme presets of 3DMark 11, the video board scored P9960 and X3321 points, respectively.
In 3DMark Extreme (1440p), it did pretty badly, scoring 3,483 points. 3DMark Ultra was even worse, allowing only 1,087 points.
Even when the board was manually overclocked and put through performance and extreme presets of 3DMark 11 again, the adapter scored 7509 points.
This all suggests that the GeForce GTX 960 from NVIDIA will not be suited for gaming at resolutions of over 1080p. The information comes from Chinese PC community PCEVA members.
The specs of the GeForce GTX 960
As we saw previously, the GM206 GPU has 1,024 CUDA cores, a base clock of 1,127 MHz, a GPU Boost clock of 1,178 MHz, and a 128-bit memory interface controlling the board's 2 GB of GDDR5 VRAM.
The card in the tests worked at 1,382 MHz, then 1,562 MHz in the manually overclocked tests, so you can expect the real score in 3DMark 11 to be of around 6,000.
In addition to the GPU and VRAM, the card possesses DisplayPort 1.2, HDMI 2.0 and two dual-link DVI ports, and an overall performance twice as good as the GeForce GTX 660.
