Page 2 - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 Architecture
The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 is based off the company's midrange performance variant of the "Maxwell" architecture first introduced in the company's GTX 750 and GTX 750 Ti. The GTX 750 series were made to show off NVIDIA's engineering prowess in producing chips that can deliver very high performance per watt. The GTX 960 continues this tradition in the mainstream segment. It is important to point out the GTX 960 is also available with 2GB memory, but as people soon found out, 4GB was actually needed. As such, the card we are covering today is the 4GB variant. For those who are looking for more performance, the GTX 970 and GTX 980 fulfills those roles.
The GM206 core implemented in the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 aims for the competitive $199 mainstream performance segment. The GTX 970 carries a MSRP of $329, while the GTX 980 is NVIDIA's $549 entry. Compared to AMD's line, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 competes with the Radeon R9 285, but with significantly lower power consumption. Specification speaking, the GM206 is essentially a GM204 sawed in half. Eight streaming multiprocessors (SMM) are enabled, whereas the GTX 980 has sixteen. Each SMM has four partitioned blocks inside, as shown in our diagram above; with 128 CUDA cores, eight texture units, 32 load/store units, and one PolyMorph engine. Each SMM has 48KB of L1 cache. As such, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 features 1024 CUDA cores and 64 texture units in aggregate. Thanks to the chopping, the memory and raster operations were also halved with respect to the GTX 970/980, so it has 32 ROPs, and a rather measly 128-bit memory interface. At 112GB/s, this is really small memory bandwidth even for a mainstream performance card, but it features 1MB shared L2 cache, as well as Third Generation Delta Color Compression, which promises to reduce memory bandwidth usage by about 25%. The GTX 960 built on the TSMC 28nm fabrication process, with a transistor count of 5.2 billion.
The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 has native support for HDMI 2.0, which means it is capable of driving 4K displays at 60Hz. There are also three DisplayPort 1.2 and dual link DVI-I connectors; this configuration will depend on the board manufacturer, however. Like the GTX 970 and GTX 980, the GTX 960 has support for NVIDIA's latest graphics processing technologies, including Dynamic Super Resolution, Multi-Frame Sampled Anti-Aliasing, Multi-Pixel Programming Sampling, Multi-Projection Acceleration, Real-Time-Voxel-Global Illumination, Third Generation Delta Color Compression, and VR Direct. Of course, there is DirectX 12 support, too.
NVIDIA pits the GeForce GTX 960's TDP at 120W, which continues the company's prowess in making GPUs with high energy efficiency. It is considerably lower than the GTX 760, the midrange card of the last generation it replaces, at 170W. This represents nearly 30% reduction in TDP. Other cards in the Maxwell stable, such as the GTX 970, is specified at 145W; while the GTX 980 is only 20W more at 165W. We will take a look into the Gigabyte G1 Gaming GeForce GTX 960's power consumption and idle/load temperatures later on in this review to see how it fares in real life.
Brushing the technical data aside, let us take a closer look at the more consumer friendly specifications. The stock clock speed configuration of a standard GTX 960 is 1127MHz core, 1178MHz boost, and 7010MHz memory. A reference GTX 960 board from NVIDIA does not exist, and the company has left it up to their board partners to design their own PCBs and adjust their factory overclocks accordingly. As such, the Gigabyte G1 Gaming GeForce GTX 960 4GB is no exception. The company's interpretation of the video card is built on a custom PCB with a WindForce 3X cooler configured at 1266MHz core, 1329MHz boost, and 7010MHz memory. The GPU is clocked 12% above stock -- but we are actually quite surprised to see its completely stock memory configuration. So exactly how much overclocking potential do we have under the hood? We will have that answered in Page 13 of this review.
With that in mind, we will take a close look at the Gigabyte GV-N960G1 GAMING-4GD G1 Gaming GeForce GTX 960 in detail on the next page, followed by our usual battery of benchmarks, before moving onto the power usage, temperature, noise, and overclocking tidbits. Stay tuned for all the juicy details in the rest of this review!
Page Index
1. Introduction, Packaging, Specifications
2. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 Architecture
3. A Closer Look, Installation, Test System
4. Benchmark: 3DMark
5. Benchmark: Battlefield 4
6. Benchmark: BioShock Infinite
7. Benchmark: Crysis 3
8. Benchmark: GRID 2
9. Benchmark: Metro: Last Light
10. Benchmark: Thief
11. Benchmark: Unigine: Heaven 4.0
12. Power Usage, Temperature, Noise
13. Overclocking and Conclusion
