Once graphics card manufacturers finish playing their strong cards in the high-end market, the competition moves to lower tiers, in an attempt to tempt users with tighter budgets to upgrade their hardware. In Nvidia's case, its newest weapon is the GeForce GTX 950. Essentially, we're looking at the little sister of the GTX 960, with spec changes that don't compromise performance too much, and allow it to reach a very interesting price.
With the virtual stagnation we're seeing in the latest generation of processors, users' interest in improving system performance once again focuses on graphics cards. In certain regions, playing at 1080p is already the norm instead of a rarity, and with upcoming technologies like 4K and DirectX 12, the graphics arms race heats up once more. The last we saw from AMD was the announcement of the Fury and Nano cards at the past E3, but it was only a matter of time before Nvidia made an equivalent move. With the arrival of the GeForce GTX 980 Ti, the 'other' giant from Santa Clara finally closed its high-end frontier, yet it needs to address the other end as soon as possible. The only card (barely) below $200 is the GTX 960, and if the plan is to convince enthusiasts to retire all those GTX 500 and 600 cards still in circulation, it needs to offer better numbers.
Make way for the GeForce GTX 950. From a technical standpoint, we're looking at the GTX 960 with a smaller package. The most relevant cuts are in the number of CUDA cores (768 vs. 1,024), texture units (48 vs. 64), and final clock speeds (1,024/1,188/6,600 vs. 1,126/1,178/7,000), but the rest of the specifications are identical. The GTX 950 uses the same Maxwell GM206 chip with 2,940 million transistors, a 128-bit memory bus, and 2 GB of GDDR5 memory. Being a slightly reduced model also allows it to improve its TDP, set at 90 watts. Nvidia is throwing all its advertising artillery at two specific points: users of HTPC systems, and those with a GeForce GTX 650, which Nvidia considers three times slower than the new card.
Depending on the environment, the brand-new GeForce GTX 950 can achieve a virtual tie with the GTX 960, or reach 70 percent of its performance in the most demanding cases. AMD's direct equivalent in price is the Radeon R7 370, which Nvidia's hardware defeats quite consistently in four out of five benchmarks (by just a few FPS, but victories nonetheless). The official price for the GeForce GTX 950 is $159, ten dollars above the R7 370. In that range, the scales tip in favor of Nvidia, but those who can stretch a bit more and reach the $200 level should consider AMD's offering. One thing is certain: In all cases, 1080p performance is more than acceptable.
