NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 launched for mainstream market

By Afaq Shahid

Posted on January 23, 2015

NVIDIA kicked off their second generation Maxwell GPUs with the launch of two high end graphics cards; the GeForce GTX 980 and GTX 970. Both of these cards have been at the top of their respective market segments since their launch and have been highly popular among gamers. However, most of the eyes have been set at company’s new Maxwell based mainstream/performance segment graphics card which is finally out now. Today, NVIDIA is releasing the GeForce GTX 960 featuring the new GM206 core.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 (1)

As expected the GM206 is a slightly cut down version of its bigger brother – the GM204 – which we saw in GTX 980 and GTX 970. The new GM206 provides the GTX 960 with 1024 CUDA cores, 64 TMUs and 32 ROPs. In terms of clocks, the GTX 960 comes with 1126 MHz core clock which goes up to 1178 MHz whereas the 2 GB GDDR5 memory is clocked at 7 GHz and is spread across a 128-bit wide memory interface. NVIDIA has opted for a narrower memory interface as compared to GTX 960’s predecessors which have 192-bit at least. However, as NVIDIA has introduced several new color compression technologies with caching improvements in second generation Maxwell architecture, the step down to 128-bit memory interface wouldn’t hurt much.

NVIDIA GPU Specification Comparison
	GTX 970	GTX 960	GTX 760	GTX 660
CUDA Cores	1664	1024	1152	960
Texture Units	104	64	96	80
ROPs	64	32	32	24
Core Clock	1050MHz	1126MHz	980MHz	980MHz
Boost Clock	1178MHz	1178MHz	1033MHz	1033MHz
Memory Clock	7GHz GDDR5	7GHz GDDR5	6GHz GDDR5	6GHz GDDR5
Memory Bus Width	256-bit	128-bit	256-bit	192-bit
VRAM	4GB	2GB	2GB	2GB
FP64	1/32 FP32	1/32 FP32	1/24 FP32	1/24 FP32
TDP	145W	120W	170W	140W
GPU	GM204	GM206	GK104	GK106
Transistor Count	5.2B	2.94B	3.5B	2.54B
Manufacturing Process	TSMC 28nm	TSMC 28nm	TSMC 28nm	TSMC 28nm
Launch Date	09/18/14	01/22/15	06/25/13	09/13/12
Launch Price	$329	$199	$249	$229

The GeForce GTX 960 comes with a TDP of only 120W thanks to the efficiency of the second generation Maxwell architecture. For display output, this new graphics card comes with two DVI ports, one HDMI and one DisplayPort.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 (3)

NVIDIA has priced the new GeForce GTX 960 at $199 for stock variants and $209 for the custom variants. Most of factory overclocked versions are available now around this price but companies are charging extra for their custom designed solutions.

While the GTX 980 and GTX 970 were meant for the 4K and multi-display gaming, the mainstream GTX 960 is expected to provide stellar gaming performance at the 1080p resolution which is by far the most used resolution.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 (2) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 (4)