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

[MEC-777]

Personally I always have a custom fan curve on mine anyway through MSI Afterburner. I like having the fan on 100% when I'm gaming, because I'm more concerned about cool temps and max performance then the minimal fan noise - which is still pretty quiet even at 100%. You hear the air more then the fans. Just a wooshing noise that isn't high pitched or annoying. So I have the fan max out when it gets to like 70 C, and a much more gentle curve below 70 C, so when I'm not gaming, the fans run pretty low. At idle, the fans are at the lowest setting MSI Afterburner will let me set.

 

Gigabyte nailed the WF 7950. I will definitely consider their WF coolers first for any new GPU I look at buying, AMD or NVIDIA.

 

The highest temps I've seen after some testing today is max 62 degrees (OC'd) in open air (case open) and about 69 (OC'd) with the case closed (warm air gets trapped in the Node 304 with higher-end GPUs on air) - which is still cooler than it used to get. Before it would hit upwards of low-mid 70's and the fans don't run as aggressively as they used to either. Cooler and quieter makes me happy.

 

They nailed it indeed.

[Meladath]

Looks like a complete joke of a card. Same speed and price as a 2 year old rebranded card from AMD.

No one gives a shit that it uses 50W less nvidia. Thats only useful in the really low, or high end.

I honestly can't see anyone even considering buying this unless they are either such a massive fanboy they can't actually think about their decisions, just buying anything nvidia throw at them, or are just plain dumb.

Wouldn't surprise me if these are the bad binned cards and they will release a 760ti later down the line which is what the 760 should have actually been. Just like every other generation with a x60ti, the original x60 was just terrible in every aspect and the x60ti was the actual card people wanted.

It has the same memory controller/bus as the 750ti, and that really will cripple it even at 1080p... I am guessing 760ti with 192 bit bus, 3GB of VRAM and all the GM206 that didn't have shit yields in september this year.

Sadly they will still sell millions on release day to deluded fanboys.

[Guest]

Doesn't account for power usage. 290 is a power hog.

Which doesn't matter 2 bull ballsacks unless your power costs a lot.

[Meladath]

Which doesn't matter 2 bull ballsacks unless your power costs a lot.

 

Yep. And even then, even if you live in a country with some of the highest electricity prices in the world, the difference will be minimal, especially if overclocked. Nvidia cards take a lot more power when overclocked, ratio wise, more than AMD really, people seem to forget that.

[Guest]

Yep. And even then, even if you live in a country with some of the highest electricity prices in the world, the difference will be minimal, especially if overclocked. Nvidia cards take a lot more power when overclocked, ratio wise, more than AMD really, people seem to forget that.

Plus people seem to list power consumption as a reason to not take AMD cards, while it is a really a non-reason unless your psu can't handle it

[NeatSquidYT]

Plus people seem to list power consumption as a reason to not take AMD cards, while it is a really a non-reason unless your psu can't handle it

More power consumption also usually means more heat. More heat coming out GPU makes whole case hotter. Makes CPU temps go up. Not as much overclockability on the GPU.

[Guest]

More power consumption also usually means more heat. More heat coming out GPU makes whole case hotter. Makes CPU temps go up. Not as much overclockability on the GPU.

I guess, but most people don't even notice that.

[DildorTheDecent]

From the factory this card will boost/overclock to 1500MHz.

To make up for its weak spec.

[Khvarrioiren]

From the factory this card will boost/overclock to 1500MHz.

To make up for its weak spec.

 

Maxwell scales quite badly considering you can rip out 300 Mhz over stock clocks and still end up with similar OC scaling than Kepler. On some cases, worse.

[ACatWithThumbs]

Maxwell scales quite badly considering you can rip out 300 Mhz over stock clocks and still end up with similar OC scaling than Kepler. On some cases, worse.

Where does Kepler scale badly?  With my OC I got an extra 10fps and it's not even a high one for my GPU.

And when seeing how fast some GTX970 get I would say Maxwell scales just as well if not better

[Khvarrioiren]

Where does Kepler scale badly?  With my OC I got an extra 10fps and it's not even a high one for my GPU.

And when seeing how fast some GTX970 get I would say Maxwell scales just as well if not better

 

Still in the 15% range when looking at FPS gained. And I said Maxwell scales badly compared to Kepler. Usually FPS gains for the 780 Ti are in the 18-22% range.

[sgloux3470]

Considering the kneecapped VRAM it'll be slower when it matters. This entire card a complete waste of time unless it's less than $200.

2GB of Vram is enough for 1080p before antialiasing + uncompressed textures. Until 2GB cards are completely phased out you'll see devs target their memory budget for them.

[sgloux3470]

Maxwell scales quite badly considering you can rip out 300 Mhz over stock clocks and still end up with similar OC scaling than Kepler. On some cases, worse.

In my experience overclocking my 980, there's a point where increasing the clocks actuslly decreases performance. It may appear stable, but when you compare the performance you csn watch ot fall off a cliff. This is especially noticeable in 3DMark since its scores are very sensitive to overclocking. I'm fairly convinced people are aiming for the highest stable clockrate on their Maxwell cards rather than the highest performing one. This could be a voltage limitation on my strix card of course. (I know aome other cards have a higher voltage ceiling.)

[DildorTheDecent]

Maxwell scales quite badly considering you can rip out 300 Mhz over stock clocks and still end up with similar OC scaling than Kepler. On some cases, worse.

Yeah. Loads of people where actually quite happy breaking 1500MHz because they couldn't do that with kepler.

Reality is it isn't necessarily better. I think that the lower the spec the higher the code clock goes in order to make up for the lower spec.

[Guest andyysplash]

I get that it'll beat out a 680 and use less power, but it's still a low-spec card. Even looking at the 760 I couldn't see the point. If we have three resolutions (1080p, 1440p and 4k) and the 980 can manage 4k (obviously better when in SLI) with the 970 destroying 1080p and faring well at 1400p it makes sense for the 960 to follow as the 1080p card, meaning it should max 1080p and push forward.

 

On my 660 my modded Skyrim (which is more CPU-bound anyways) uses 1500MB+ VRAM constantly and that's WITHOUT any of those nice 4k or 8k texture mods. The poor card struggles when there's detailed textures in view etc. and I've seen evidence of the much more powerful 660Ti barely handling Star Citizen. I think that shows that 3GB VRAM is a minimum. Sure some games won't use more than 2, but the extra gig stops any game going over by 100MB and just allows for better textures.

 

As for the bus, Nvidia seem to have a thing about low bitrate buses. My 660 has a 192-bit bus (which people were bemoaning because the 560Ti had a 256-bit bus) and for all the optimisations and algorithms in the world I can't see why it makes sense to limit down to a bus LOWER than a previous x60 card. As for the cores, there's more of them (yay) but it doesn't seem too many more, though I can't remember how many the 980 has so that may be a bad point.

 

I guess a 770 on sale or saving up for the 970 makes the most sense if you need/want Nvidia. I used to use Shadowplay but I guess I could live with an R9 series card. The 3xx will either be good enough or will push the prices of the 2x down so much an R9 290/290x will be sub-£200

[Guest andyysplash]

2GB of Vram is enough for 1080p before antialiasing + uncompressed textures. Until 2GB cards are completely phased out you'll see devs target their memory budget for them.

 

Interestingly enough until devs stop targeting 2GB cards and start demanding more VRAM and making games that require more the manufacturers will keep making 2GB cards.

[That Norwegian Guy]

2GB of Vram is enough for 1080p before antialiasing + uncompressed textures. Until 2GB cards are completely phased out you'll see devs target their memory budget for them.

 

The Witcher 3, Star Citizen and Dying Light are all examples of games that will be bottlenecked by a mere 2GB frame buffer already, filterless at 1080p. There's 8192p composite skin and clothing textures on characters in Dying Light on ultra. The Witcher 3 devs already stated 3GB as a requirement for Ultra 1080p. As for Star Citizen, it's already evident by tweaking configs to see how much VRAM it occupies with all filters manually turned off on ultra, and 2GB is not enough, and that's before they've added all the rendering techniques they promised as well as full PBR. In addition, this is in arena commander, which is an example of a light load within Star Citizen. Planetside/ FPS module will be torture on a 2GB buffer.

 

So no, game developers are forging ahead with or without Nvidia yielding to demands. The 960 is simply going to be obsolete before it arrives.

[sgloux3470]

The Witcher 3, Star Citizen and Dying Light are all examples of games that will be bottlenecked by a mere 2GB frame buffer already, filterless at 1080p. There's 8192p composite skin and clothing textures on characters in Dying Light on ultra. The Witcher 3 devs already stated 3GB as a requirement for Ultra 1080p. As for Star Citizen, it's already evident by tweaking configs to see how much VRAM it occupies with all filters manually turned off on ultra, and 2GB is not enough, and that's before they've added all the rendering techniques they promised as well as full PBR. In addition, this is in arena commander, which is an example of a light load within Star Citizen. Planetside/ FPS module will be torture on a 2GB buffer.

 

So no, game developers are forging ahead with or without Nvidia yielding to demands. The 960 is simply going to be obsolete before it arrives.

We'll see when those games come out.

8192x8192 textures will look identical to the 4096x4096 or even 2048x2048. Quite simply, the pixels are dense enough on the uv map that you're going to have one hell of a time finding a difference for 2x-4x the memory usage. Did Techland hire FakeFactory or something?

[sgloux3470]

Interestingly enough until devs stop targeting 2GB cards and start demanding more VRAM and making games that require more the manufacturers will keep making 2GB cards.

The low end/mid range will stay on 2gb for a long time.

The high end already moved on years ago.

[Guest andyysplash]

The low end/mid range will stay on 2gb for a long time.

The high end already moved on years ago.

 

Because of that vicious circle I just pointed out. It's the same reason Adobe won't even think about supporting Linux even though they have the money to do so - fact is not enough people use it for them to make a profit, but people WON'T use it because they want Photoshop and other things.

 

The 'high end' has had 2GB cards until very recently. The 6xx series was 2GB, the 770 was 2GB by default and the 4GB version wasn't worth it and it's only really been the 780 that had a higher frame buffer (disregarding the whole mess of Titans). Pre R9 series AMD cards were 2GB and aside from the 280 upwards they're just the old HD7xxx cards including amount of VRAM. The 280 and 280x are still the old cards but got 3GB instead, and the 290/290x actually got 4GB, so really it's only the 290/290x that have moved on 'years ago'.

 

Also I'd hardly call x60 'low end'. In fact if we look at the actual low end (the GT cards) we find that they ship with more than 2GB VRAM in some cases (though it's mostly pointless unless you're driving a 4K screen, at which point why do you need that sort of screen if you're not doing content creation or gaming on it). The x60 cards are supposed to represent the minimum for maxing games @ 1080p (sans filters), and as games become more demanding so does the card need to come significantly more powerful.

 

We're not running consoles and are stuck with a particular platform set of unchangeable hardware for 5 years until the poor machines have so much dust inside they can't manage 30fps at 792p anymore, so I really doubt we're going to be stuck and not progressing.

 

What's the point of buying a new card for it to have say £20 more performance than the old one, which was already bottlenecking hugely? Especially when it's not likely you can sell the old card for anywhere its RRP since it's been price cut and is now second hand. You're now close to twice the money you spent on the old card worse off and only have a tiny performance increase to show for it.

[miagisan]

I'm not particularly impressed to be honest... the 280 is 1.5 years old at this point, beating it is no huge feat at this point. I'm curious to see how this will stack up to a hypothetical R9 380.

I agree, especially since the 280 is a rebrand  of a card thats over 3 years old.....

 

The 960 is definitely looking underwhelming.

[sgloux3470]

Mid range is by mo means a "max everything out at 1080p" bracket. It's a "games will be playabe on high settings" bracket. We've been a bit spoiled in the last few years, and the only game to really be our "Crysis" has been assassins creed unity, wherein omly top end cards can even play it decently.

No one uodatea their mid range GPU year after year. The average is 3 years, which ends up being around a 100% gain in the same bracket in that timeframe.

Games on Ultra require massively more horsepower to run than on High, without appreciable benefit. Ultra will always be on the bleeding edge, but most people will be content to pkay games with reduced settings. 2gb cards have a couple more years I would wager. It gives their higher end cards an extra bulletpoint on the box aftetall.

[Khvarrioiren]

Yeah. Loads of people where actually quite happy breaking 1500MHz because they couldn't do that with kepler.

Reality is it isn't necessarily better. I think that the lower the spec the higher the code clock goes in order to make up for the lower spec.

 

That's the thing. People buy them because of the higher core clock numbers. That's pretty much it.

[ChipWoodChainSaw]

what did it score?

[MEC-777]

The 'high end' has had 2GB cards until very recently. The 6xx series was 2GB, the 770 was 2GB by default and the 4GB version wasn't worth it and it's only really been the 780 that had a higher frame buffer (disregarding the whole mess of Titans). Pre R9 series AMD cards were 2GB and aside from the 280 upwards they're just the old HD7xxx cards including amount of VRAM. The 280 and 280x are still the old cards but got 3GB instead, and the 290/290x actually got 4GB, so really it's only the 290/290x that have moved on 'years ago'.

 

The high-end HD 7XXX cards (7950/7970) had 3GB Vram, same as the 280/280X.