Nvidia 960 Performs Slightly Faster Than Radeon R9 280 (3D Mark Scores)

[ACatWithThumbs]

Oh come on Nvidia, we all know that card should perform between a 770 and 780 and not at a 770.

That's not 770 performance that is GTX760 performance.

My GTX670 outperforms it by 1000 points in Firestrike lol

This is the most useless card I've seen in a while.

[Tjc222]

This should've been 3GB VRAM simply to account for how hungry some games can be. If you want game developers to start pushing the boundaries again, maybe release hardware that gives them a far higher baseline as far as raw horsepower goes. 

2GB cards really shouldn't exist. Even business PCs can get by just fine on integrated these days for multi monitor support. Enough of this 2GB RAM for a piece of gaming hardware. 

This card is strictly meant for 1080p and nothing more. You don't need more then 2GB of vram for 1080p.

What people don't understand is this is a card for people who just a cheap $200 that can play almost any game maxed out at 1080p except for the occasional highly graphical game (Crysis 3, etc.). People with more money that have a 970, 980, 290 or 290x look at this card and go "Ewww it's shit." when it's not for them. If you have the money to be spending $300+ on a GPU then you shouldn't even be looking at this.

[ACatWithThumbs]

This card is strictly meant for 1080p and nothing more. You don't need more then 2GB of vram for 1080p.

What people don't understand is this is a card for people who just a cheap $200 that can play almost any game maxed out at 1080p except for the occasional highly graphical game (Crysis 3, etc.). People with more money that have a 970, 980, 290 or 290x look at this card and go "Ewww it's shit." when it's not for them. If you have the money to be spending $300+ on a GPU then you shouldn't even be looking at this.

Not true 2GB isn't enough for 1080p especially with high res textures and AA they always cripple Vram so that they can sell more GPUs.

The GTX670/680 are bottlenecked with 2GB just as the GTX580 was with 1,5Gb and the 780TI is with 3GB.

 

[Tjc222]

Not true 2GB isn't enough for 1080p especially with high res textures and AA they always cripple Vram so that they can sell more GPUs.

The GTX670/680 are bottlenecked with 2GB just as the GTX580 was with 1,5Gb and the 780TI is with 3GB.

 

If you're going to reply at least do your research or actually have some experience with it because my GTX 670 with 2GB maxes out about 98% of the games at 1080p. The GTX 960 will be more than enough and will be faster than the 670 for sure. 

[D00M_GaMeR]

GTX 960 better them R9 280, big kick in the bolls for AMD  

[Opcode]

GTX 960 better them R9 280, big kick in the bolls for AMD

How it stacks up against the R9 380 is where the final decision will be made. Keep in mind the R9 280 is a ten month old card now based on three year old architecture.

[ltguy]

If you're going to reply at least do your research or actually have some experience with it because my GTX 670 with 2GB maxes out about 98% of the games at 1080p. The GTX 960 will be more than enough and will be faster than the 670 for sure. 

I'll vouch for him. I can exceed 2gb of vram at 1080p. But since your card doesn't have more than 2gb of vram, you sir, cannot do the research.

[Brainless906]

If you're going to reply at least do your research or actually have some experience with it because my GTX 670 with 2GB maxes out about 98% of the games at 1080p. The GTX 960 will be more than enough and will be faster than the 670 for sure. 

 

 

Right. Go ahead and try to play something like Shadow of Mordor with 2gb of vram. I've got a pair of 7970s and they get crushed by the 3gb VRAM they have if i try to play with textures on ultra. 

They say 6gb of VRAM for ultra and they do not kid, turning from high textures to ultra brought me from 80-90 fps to a wild ride of 20-50 fps with my vram hitting max constantly.

 

Edit: and this is of course 1080p

[Tjc222]

Right. Go ahead and try to play something like Shadow of Mordor with 2gb of vram. I've got a pair of 7970s and they get crushed by the 3gb VRAM they have if i try to play with textures on ultra. 

They say 6gb of VRAM for ultra and they do not kid, turning from high textures to ultra brought me from 80-90 fps to a wild ride of 20-50 fps with my vram hitting max constantly.

 

Edit: and this is of course 1080p

Again you're being ignorant, did you not see my post? I said "98% of the games at 1080p". SoM and Crysis 3 are examples and I bet there are a couple more, I just don't care for the games.

[Tjc222]

I'll vouch for him. I can exceed 2gb of vram at 1080p. But since your card doesn't have more than 2gb of vram, you sir, cannot do the research.

You think the only card I have a 670? I was just using that as my examply. I've got a 970 in another machine a 280x in another and I've messed around with my friend 270x, 290x and 780Ti as well.

[Brainless906]

Again you're being ignorant, did you not see my post? I said "98% of the games at 1080p". SoM and Crysis 3 are examples and I bet there are a couple more, I just don't care for the games.

I'd hardly call myself ignorant, thats a bit of a jump there bud. Modern games are pushing vram more and more and heres a spoiler alert, were not gonna be going backwards in that respect. I'll bet with most AAA games out there you can push the vram over 2gb if you want it to look pretty enough at 1080p. I think arguing a gaming grade gpu with only 2g is "more than enough" is just silly.

[Fetzie]

So it is slightly faster than AMD's almost-top-tier card from 3 years ago?

How it stacks up against the R9 380 is where the final decision will be made. Keep in mind the R9 280 is a ten month old card now based on three year old architecture.

R9 280 is the exact same thing as an HD 7950. Released January 9th, 2012.

[Tjc222]

I'd hardly call myself ignorant, thats a bit of a jump there bud. Modern games are pushing vram more and more and heres a spoiler alert, were not gonna be going backwards in that respect. I'll bet with most AAA games out there you can push the vram over 2gb if you want it to look pretty enough at 1080p. I think arguing a gaming grade gpu with only 2g is "more than enough" is just silly.

If you want a gaming grade gpu, that's what the 970, 980, 290 and 290x are for. A 960 is a middle of the range gpu and has middle of the range specs. Nvidia isn't going to go out of their way to add 1GB of vram more when most people buying a cheap card like that can't afford anything past a 1080p @60hz monitor.

[TroubleKlef]

So it is slightly faster than AMD's almost-top-tier card from 3 years ago?

R9 280 is the exact same thing as an HD 7950. Released January 9th, 2012.

 

 

Not surprising seeing AMD's lack of R&D to put out anything new. 

[Brainless906]

Not surprising seeing AMD's lack of R&D to put out anything new. 

 

 

High density stacked memory on the 3xx series would like to have a word with you.

 

EDIT: which is fun as the 2xx keeps up pretty solid with the 9xx series despite being so old...so...ah touche?

[Mew]

Nvidia is using some trickery to reuse memory data so it's not constantly being loaded in.

 

 

Didn't the R9 285 have the same technology, but it seemed to be totally ignored?

[AlwaysFSX]

Didn't the R9 285 have the same technology, but it seemed to be totally ignored?

I don't remember it being mentioned anywhere?

[TroubleKlef]

High density stacked memory on the 3xx series would like to have a word with you.

 

EDIT: which is fun as the 2xx keeps up pretty solid with the 9xx series despite being so old...so...ah touche?

 

Touche indeed. Yet for some reason AMD is still behind the curve. Old architectures that require much more power just to barely compete. No wonder so many executives were dismissed. 

[Brainless906]

Didn't the R9 285 have the same technology, but it seemed to be totally ignored?

 

I don't remember it being mentioned anywhere?

 

 

"By far the most consequential innovation in Tonga is a new form of compression for frame buffer color data. GPUs have long used various forms of compression in order to store color information more efficiently, but evidently, the method Tonga uses for frame buffer data is something novel. AMD says the compression is lossless, so it should have no impact on image quality, and "delta-based." Tonga's graphics core knows how to read and write data in this compressed format, and the compression happens transparently, without any special support from applications.

 

We don't have many details on exactly how it works, but essentially, "delta-based" means the compression method keys on change. My best bet is that whenever a newly completed frame is written to memory, only the pixels whose color have changed from the frame prior are updated. ARM does something along those lines with its Mali mobile GPUs, and I expect AMD has taken a similar path.

 

The payoff is astounding: AMD claims 40% higher memory bandwidth efficiency. I'm not quite sure what the basis of comparison is for that claim, nor am I clear on whether 40% is the best-case scenario or just the general case. But whatever; we can measure these things.

 

3DMark Vantage's color fill test has long been gated primarily by memory bandwidth, rather than the GPU's raw pixel fill rate. Here's how Tonga fares in it."

 

read more at tech report

[Cheddle]

Sad times. the 256-bit bus width on the 980 holds it back at higher resolutions.

 

I predict that the 960 will hit a wall at 2560x1440

 

if it was 4gb, 2560bit bus, running these in SLI would be fantastic.

[AlwaysFSX]

 

"By far the most consequential innovation in Tonga is a new form of compression for frame buffer color data. GPUs have long used various forms of compression in order to store color information more efficiently, but evidently, the method Tonga uses for frame buffer data is something novel. AMD says the compression is lossless, so it should have no impact on image quality, and "delta-based." Tonga's graphics core knows how to read and write data in this compressed format, and the compression happens transparently, without any special support from applications.

 

We don't have many details on exactly how it works, but essentially, "delta-based" means the compression method keys on change. My best bet is that whenever a newly completed frame is written to memory, only the pixels whose color have changed from the frame prior are updated. ARM does something along those lines with its Mali mobile GPUs, and I expect AMD has taken a similar path.

 

The payoff is astounding: AMD claims 40% higher memory bandwidth efficiency. I'm not quite sure what the basis of comparison is for that claim, nor am I clear on whether 40% is the best-case scenario or just the general case. But whatever; we can measure these things.

 

3DMark Vantage's color fill test has long been gated primarily by memory bandwidth, rather than the GPU's raw pixel fill rate. Here's how Tonga fares in it."

 

read more at tech report

 

Why wasn't that announced more?

[Paranoid Kami]

When I bought my 6950 with 1GB years ago, everyone was saying that 1GB was more than enough for 1080 gaming. Eventually Skyrim came out and I got bottlenecked hard and even though my card could handle the performance, it couldn't do anything about the Vram amount. More and more games came out after that where 2GB Vram became the norm. I plan on keeping my GPU for about 3 years and I have no intention of making the same mistake again. I won't be buying any card unless it has 3-4 GB of Vram.

[Fetzie]

Not surprising seeing AMD's lack of R&D to put out anything new.

nVidia re-hashed the GK110 workstation chip about half a dozen times for GTX 780, 780ti, Titan, Titan Black, Titan Z. On top of that, the GTX 770 was a GTX 680 and the GTX 760 was a GTX 670. Just about the only 700 series card that was developed specifically for that label, was the 750ti. So yeah, don't fall off that high horse of yours.

[ACatWithThumbs]

If you're going to reply at least do your research or actually have some experience with it because my GTX 670 with 2GB maxes out about 98% of the games at 1080p. The GTX 960 will be more than enough and will be faster than the 670 for sure. 

The firestrike score is 1000 points lower than my GTX670 score...

And I actually have experience which is why I wrote it in the first place it happens to me on my 670 all the time and to my cousin that has a 770.

Battlefield 4 can start to stutter on bigger maps because the game will go up to 2,1GB which is really annoying when you have an average of 70fps.

Same goes for many other games and it's simply annoying when you have enough power to run the games but you have to turn down textures or AA because the game takes 100mb more Vram than you have.

AMD knows this that's why they put 3GB on the HD7950/7970 and 4GB on the R9-290/290X

 

 

and the GTX 760 was a GTX 670. Just about the only 700 series card that was developed specifically for that label, was the 750ti. So yeah, don't fall off that high horse of yours.

 

The GTX760 isn't a 670 it's a complete new card:

GTX670 1344 Cuda Cores 112 Texture Units

GTX760 1152 Cuda Cores 96 Texture Units

[Brainless906]

Why wasn't that announced more?

 

 

Because its not exciting unless nvidia does it?

 

Apparently it works too

 

 

"Whoa.

 

Compare the R9 285 to the Radeon HD 7950 Boost, which we used in place of the Radeon R9 280. (Only 8MHz of clock speed separates them.) The 7950 Boost has 240 GB/s of memory bandwidth to Tonga's 176 GB/s, yet the new Radeon maintains a substantially higher pixel fill rate. That's Tonga magic in action.

 

Perhaps my concerns about Tonga's memory bandwidth were premature. We'll have to see how well this compression mojo works in real games, but it certainly has my attention.

 

That's not all. Tonga has inherited a new front-end and internal organization from Hawaii that grants it more potential for polygon throughput. The triangle setup rate has doubled from two primitives per clock in Tahiti to four per clock in Tonga. Beyond that, Tonga adds some of its own provisions to improve geometry and tessellation performance, including a larger parameter cache that spills into the L2 cache when needed. The division of work between the geometry front-end units has been improved, and these units can better re-use vertices, which AMD says should help performance in cases where "many small triangles" are present."