14 DAY TRIAL // After months of waiting and combing through contradictory reports, the GeForce GTX 960 graphics card has finally been detailed properly, even if NVIDIA hasn't actually launched the product.
As far as anyone knows, the official release date continues to be January 22, 2015, exactly one week from now (January 15, 2015).
Nevertheless, thanks to some leaked slides, we now have an idea of what we will have on our hands once the day finally comes. And the answer is actually quite encouraging.
It's enough to make us wonder how Advanced Micro Devices will respond, if it will do so at all with any sort of promptness after its not-so-secret executive shuffle.
The GeForce GTX 960 graphics card
This video adapter will be powered by the GM206 graphics processing unit. That much has been known since nearly the beginning of murmurs regarding the board, all those months ago.
However, other than the part number and the manufacturing technology used to make it (28nm) we did not know anything about the chip. Now we do.
The number of CUDA cores is 1,024, while the Maxwell processor also integrates 32 ROPs (raster operating units) and 64 TMUs (texture mapping units).
Meanwhile, the memory interface is of 128 bits. Pretty narrow really, but NVIDIA claims that its lossless texture compression technology will improve bandwidth utilization enough that there won't be any real disadvantage.
Speaking of memory, there are 2 GB of GDDR5 VRAM installed on this thing, running at 7 GHz, and thus, enabling a bandwidth of 112 GB/s.
And thus, we reach the part that has eluded us for the better part of three months: the clocks of the GPU. They are of 1,127 MHz (Base state) and 1,178 MHz (boost state).
Most of the custom OEM models of the GTX 960 have had 1,178 MHz as the base speed, which led us to believe that may be the reference stock performance. Clearly, that is not truly the case.
NVIDIA reportedly claims that the video board will be an “overclocker's dream” in its segment and offer twice the performance of the GTX 660 even without tweaks. A bold claim, but we suppose we'll get to see how true it is.
Availability and pricing
Featuring DisplayPort 1.2, HDMI 2.0 and two dual-link DVI ports, the GeForce GTX 960 will be released by NVIDIA on January 22, as we said, but the price is still unknown, so we can only go with the previous assumption of $415 / €350 to $500 / €420.
