14 DAY TRIAL // Indications of an impending NVIDIA GTX 950 arrival were all around the internet weeks before the actual launch took place. As was to be expected, NVIDIA finally brought the rumored card to the public.
Introduced as the second graphics card based on the GM206 GPU after the GTX 960, the GTX 950 is the new mid-entry graphical solution that brings decent performance in full-HD resolution in all available games. NVIDIA decided not to sell the newest graphics card in any factory default form factor, but via custom manufacturers.
The new GeForce GTX 950 is powered by the low cost, and still highly capable, GM206-250 GPU featuring 768 stream processors, 48 texture units, 32 raster operations pipelines and a quite old-fashioned 128-bit memory interface. The graphics card's processor frequency will be boostable to 1188 MHz from the base 1024MHz while the GDDR5 memory can also be overclocked to 6.60GHz. This is a fairly good performance boost. The card has a compute performance of around 1.57TFLOPS, with potential higher numbers given by the overclocking measures applied by custom manufacturers.
Decent performance at a very affordable price
The new Maxwell second-generation GM206 GPU supports all modern technologies and application programming interfaces that include the DirectX 12, OpenGL 4.3, OpenCL 1.1. It will obviously arrive with NVIDIA's proprietary technologies as well, like the PhysX, GameWorks, G-Sync and other applications that slightly boost the GPU's graphic performance.
The new GPU also provides the H.265 video codec as graphically accelerated in order to encode and decode the new 4K videos in a smooth playback, and it also fully supports the HDCP 2.2 content protection for the HDMI 2.0 in order to allow users to playback movies on the upcoming UHD Blu-ray disks.
Gaming-wise, the card is evidently placed between the GTX 960 and the GTX 750, with very good performance in all the latest games available on the market. Price-wise, the new card is meant to compete head-on with AMD's Radeon R7 370 Trinidad GPU that on paper looks much more capable than the new GTX 950.
Having a larger, 256-bit, memory bandwidth, more stream processors and a comparable core clock of 1020 MHz make it only $20 more expensive. However, the GTX 950 does have the advantage to be more flexible at overclocking and a final 1317MHz boost clock may take the final prize on performance values.
The new card is available worldwide for $159 (€140).
