Friday, January 16th 2015
GeForce GTX 960 3DMark Numbers Emerge
Ahead of its January 22nd launch, Chinese PC community PCEVA members leaked performance figures of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 960. The card was installed on a test-bed driven by a Core i7-4770K overclocked to 4.50 GHz. The card itself appears to be factory-overclocked, if these specs are to believed. The card scored P9960 and X3321 in the performance and extreme presets of 3DMark 11, respectively. On standard 3DMark FireStrike, the card scored 6636 points. With some manual overclocking thrown in, it managed to score 7509 points in the same test. 3DMark Extreme (1440p) was harsh on this card, it scored 3438 points. 3DMark Ultra was too much for the card to chew, and it could only manage 1087 points. Looking at these numbers, the GTX 960 could be an interesting offering for Full HD (1920 x 1080) gaming, not a pixel more.
Source:
PCEVA Forums
98 Comments on GeForce GTX 960 3DMark Numbers Emerge
Stop thinking in numbers, start thinking in results
My 780ti has a bus of 384. The 980 has a bus of 256. It only has 1Gb extra memory. It's bus is 128 smaller than my card (or only 2/3 of a 780ti.) It's faster than my card (only, it uses higher clocks but it performs better at 4k and it's not all down to the extra 1Gb memory. The Maxwell cards feature an effective texture compression algorithm that offsets the need for a larger bus. When folk bitch about it having a small bus they simply don't understand the engineering or the market. This card only has 2Gb memory - it's gpu isn't powerful enough for 1440p+ gaming - it doesn't need (in fact the GPU chip itself cant handle) lots of bandwidth.
Stop being so ignorant about the technologies, it's tiresome and childish. Maxwell doesn't need as large a memory bus because of other technology developments - get over it.
not even 1k on ultra.
Would need 2 to compete with a single 970 at 1080.
And like 6 to compete with a single 970 at 4k LOL
biggest part of the cards potential is its price. I think that a launch price of 199$ is quite good, if after 4-6 week the card will settle in the 170-180$ price range than its a very good buy ( and if the card support sli, and from GB g1 I will say yes ) than sli on the midrange is a quite good option for eye candy detail on 1080p. ( assuming a price of 175$ per card and a total power consumption of about 90-105% of a single gtx970 )
a card that perform like gtx680 but with 2/3 of it's tdp it's good! ( if price is right )
How much higher? 5K? 8K?
Having said that, I'm sure true enthusiasts would recall that in addition to the delta colour compression, Nvidia stated that a Maxwell shader module has 90% of the performance of the Kepler SMthanks to the rejigged resources and additional cache. In the 780 Ti's case, its 15 SMX's would equate fairly well with the GTX 980's 16 SMM's with the latter pulling away in demanding situations thanks to the higher ROP resources.
With a few salient facts at hand it should be a relatively easy matter to deduce the performance parameters without resorting to hyperbole.
I'll stop now, so that some random can explain why this card being a fail because it cant deliver playable framerates at 1080p with 8xSSAA enabled.
videocardz.com/54358/nvidia-maxwell-gm200-pictured
All I'm saying after these first couple of tests is, without Maxwell compression methods, the 970 memory bandwidth would have been totally saturated at a Very High preset on 1440p. But with the compression, it's got a butt-load of bandwidth to spare. The 770 has identical bandwidth, so if I can safely assume Maxwell compression is precisely 30%, a 4GB 770 would have too little memory bandwidth available for this one game on 1440p.
I'm being as vague as possible for now so my article doesn't become entirely worthless, and I've not done enough tests to give you 100% certain answer. Not to mention NVidia are currently the only people that allow you to measure PCIe bus usage, AMD don't have it nailed in yet.
I took a day off my day-job to do this, and now I'm starting to realise it's going to take a lot longer.
Not sure why every thread regarding NVidia, AMD, or Intel has to be a fest of who can make the most ignorant comment that starts a fan war. But I guess certain people constantly cooking up AMD hatred on each thread and the people automatically complaining about NVidia not overpowering a middle ground card suffice to the biggest reasons these threads end up in spam fests.
If not: It should not be able to run 4K in 2015, maybe not even in 2016 or more seriously 2017. o_O
Why? I can count on my hand the people who have a 4K monitor and can only afford a mid range card (if any at all).
I think he was merely being sarcastic to illustrate the comments to come and the absurdity therein.
Lot of people forget that you don't need to run max settings to enjoy the game, just running the native resolution on low/medium is good enough.
The 960 seems to be scoring a reasonable amount higher than the 760 and with maxwell should use significantly less power, as long as its priced competitively with the outgoing 760 I see no problem here.
Also people, if you don't like it, don't buy it. Its simple :)
The 128 bit bus will quickly get overwhelmed with anything coming out in the next year or so. Sorry but, Nvidia pushed this crap just so people would buy their 970 GTX's instead. Otherwise, with a 256 bit bus, the 970 sales would be eaten into buy the 960.
As Baffles said, if you do not like it, do not buy it. For what it is, it is probably fine but, 128 bit bus is still very limiting.