NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 900 graphics card series has just received yet another new family member today in the form of GeForce GTX 950 graphics card As per its name, the card is positioned just under GTX 960 which was launched back in January.
In terms of specifications, the Maxwell-based GM206-powered card runs at a base clock speed of 1,024 MHz that can be pushed further to 1,188 MHz. The card also contains a total of 768 CUDA Cores and 48 texture units while it is also equipped with 2 GB GDDR5 memory that is running on 128-bit memory bus at 3,300 MHz.
This is how the GTX 950 fares against other GTX 900 series cards:
When compared to its nearest competitor (according to NVIDIA, that is), the AMD Radeon R7 370, the GTX 950 has a number of extra features such as support for DirectX 12’s Feature Level 12.1 as well as HDMI 2.0 that allows it to playback 4K contents at 60 fps. There are some performance differences too between the two cards according to NVIDIA’s internal test:
While the target market of GTX 950 is rather obvious with its price point and capabilities, we are rather intrigued at how NVIDIA put a lot of emphasis for MOBA games with GTX 950. This include a specific one-click optimization through GeForce Experience for three selected MOBA titles: Dota 2, Heroes of the Storm, and League of Legends.
Referred to as the “Low Latency Settings”, the optimization reduces the maximum pre-rendered frames to one, and activates V-Sync. Additionally, it also optimizes refresh rate to 60 Hz for Heroes of the Storm and 100 Hz for Dota 2 as well as League of Legends. However, these refresh rate need to be supported by user’s monitor as well.
NVIDIA’s MFAA will be turned on for Heroes of The Storm under this optimization, as the game requirements is lower than the other two titles. The reason behind these optimizations is that GTX 950 is apparently powerful enough that the amount of pre-rendered frames can be reduced to just one instead of two as per default settings. This apparently lead to faster response time between mouse click and the action on the screen, said NVIDIA.
Interestingly, we were told by NVIDIA that the “Low Latency Settings” for these game will only appear in GFE for GTX 950 for the time being. In other words, they will not appear in GFE for other GeForce cards. This is exactly what we meant by how the company is putting a lot of focus on MOBA games for GTX 950.
With the arrival of GTX 950, this is how NVIDIA’s current GeForce desktop graphics card line up looks like:
GTX Titan X: US$999 (RM 4,125)
GTX 980 Ti: US$649 (RM 2,887)
GTX 980: US$499 (RM 2,061)
GTX 970: US$329 (RM 1,359)
GTX 960: US$199 (RM 822)
GTX 950: US$159 (RM 657)
GTX 750 Ti: US$119 (RM 492)
Since this is a hard launch, NVIDIA’s various add-in-board partners have shipped the card right away and should popped up at retailers anytime soon. There are plenty of choices around as you can see below but as for Malaysian pricing of these cards, we’ll keep you guys posted once we heard about them from respective manufacturers.
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