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Yep cutting that bus down to 128 harmed the performance and gave it a much poorer performance per watt than the 980 and 970. A 192 bit bus would have probably given around 20% more performance overall for about 5 watts or so increase in power consumption.It's mostly because of the 128 bit bus, that seriously hurt it's performance. Like I said, it should have been atleast 192 bit with 3gb of vram....then it probably would have been right around 770 performance.
Yep cutting that bus down to 128 harmed the performance and gave it a much poorer performance per watt than the 980 and 970. A 192 bit bus would have probably given around 20% more performance overall for about 5 watts or so increase in power consumption.
The only way to explain the cut down to 128 is if there is a 960 Ti planned....otherwise I just think it was a horrible move all around.
Like I said for 960 Ti, I'm hoping the specs come out to something like 1280 cores with 192 bit and 3gb Vram. Thats the perfect beast card for 1080p. The 960 simply can't max out games even at 1080p with that 128 bit bus, you need atleast ~200gb/s bandwidth to do it.....and the 960 only at 112 is just pathetic IMO.
Again thats even if a 960 Ti is planned, I sure as hell hope so.
You are talking about a theoretical card at this point though with nothing concrete. The 960 with a 192 bit bus would have been a better overall card for the class its in. Then there could be a 960 Ti based on GM204.That would push both the price and performance much too close to the upcoming $250 GTX 960 Ti, which will outperform the GTX 770.
You missed the entire point. The fact that the 980 is 85% faster while only using 40% more power shows the 960 has much worse efficiency.
Um no its most certainly not always like that. In fact its pretty common to even be the other way around. With last gen the 760 through 780 Ti all delivered nearly identical performance per watt. I am talking actual watts not the TDP. The fact that the 980 has twice the specs of the 960 and higher clocks yet its WAY more efficient shows something is screwy or completely unbalanced with the GM206.It's always like that -- the part with the most parallelism wins. Best to have more hardware and downclock for best efficiency. This is nothing unique to 960. (Just sayin'.)
Ngreedia at it again, just wait for the first price drop folks wont be far away...
The 960 is also much shorter. The longest one is ~10.5, but most are 10".
Um no its most certainly not always like that. In fact its pretty common to even be the other way around. With last gen the 760 through 780 Ti all delivered nearly identical performance per watt. I am talking actual watts not the TDP. The fact that the 980 has twice the specs of the 960 and higher clocks yet its WAY more efficient shows something is screwy or completely unbalanced with the GM206.
Thats just crazy. Used 780's on the forum here I've seen selling for $260-$270 or so, and a 780 is way better than a 770.
I actually recently payed $235 shipped for a used 780, but I know I got a super good deal there.
But like I said, I recently paid $125 shipped for a used gtx 670 too, which is just as strong as the 960 and only uses 40w more. I believe 760's go for about $150-160 shipped, and are about the same strength as a 670.
The 980 voltage regulation is very aggressive and the quoted 165W TDP for the card is simply wrong. If the load to the card is held constant, power consumption is much higher. Games don't generally load the GPU that much, that consistently.Um no its most certainly not always like that. In fact its pretty common to even be the other way around. With last gen the 760 through 780 Ti all delivered nearly identical performance per watt. I am talking actual watts not the TDP. The fact that the 980 has twice the specs of the 960 and higher clocks yet its WAY more efficient shows something is screwy or completely unbalanced with the GM206.
I was not talking about the TDP. I was talking about actual average power usage in a real game in the Techpowerup review. The 960 at reference clocks uses 108 watts average in Metro LL and the 980 uses 156. That is actually only 45% more power that the 980 uses over the 960 and the 980 was also 80% faster overall in that review at 1080. That makes the efficiency of the 980 vastly superior to the 960.The 980 voltage regulation is very aggressive and the quoted 165W TDP for the card is simply wrong. If the load to the card is held constant, power consumption is much higher. Games don't generally load the GPU that much, that consistently.
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/nvidia-geforce-gtx-980-970-maxwell,review-33038-11.html
For someone like me, coming from a 560 Ti and being budget constrained, this card makes sense if I were wanting to buy new. As long as I can get 1080p30 out of things maxed out for the next 12 months, I'm happy. However if the rumored Ti variants see the light of day shortly, I will probably jump on that instead.
Not all of us can afford $400-600 cards, and have priorities to deal with first.
EDIT: I saw that there are two empty pads where GDDR5 modules would be (one on front/reverse each) - who wants to bet the farm on there being a 3GB/192-bit version in the works?
Well we can argue all we want about it having a 128 bit bus or 2GB of RAM but we can't deny it beats the Radeon 285 in every game and it does so using 100 fewer watts. Where I work we sell the Radeon 285 for $270 same as the Radeon 285 so that's a pretty big win for the green team in my books.
Yeah their pricing is nuts. While shopping for used Core i5 3570 CPUs they were still damn near at LIST PRICE upon introduction for the most part. (hovering around $170-220 depending on seller)
With that said, I'd like to buy a new card for the warranty if nothing else (and the 960 is between 2-25% faster than the 760, which was what I was originally looking at before the reviews hit), but if a great deal is staring me in the face for $200 or less I just may jump on a reference 680/770 here on the forums instead per your advice.
The other MSI GTX 960 is 1" smaller in both L & H. Also, look at the PCB. That's how big I wish the coolers were. That way even smaller cases can be developed and used in the future.
According to the ad copy NVIDIA is targeting 460, 560 and 660 owners with this card. They claim that 2/3rds of their x60 owners are on those older cards.
These are basically your LoL and DOTA 2 gamers (of which, BTW, there are a lot). But I think there will be new graphics assets coming to DOTA 2 soon so I'm not sure how the VRAM capacity will hold up.
I think sometimes enthusiasts lose sight of just how much gaming goes on in the mid-range.
According to the ad copy NVIDIA is targeting 460, 560 and 660 owners with this card. They claim that 2/3rds of their x60 owners are on those older cards.
These are basically your LoL and DOTA 2 gamers (of which, BTW, there are a lot). But I think there will be new graphics assets coming to DOTA 2 soon so I'm not sure how the VRAM capacity will hold up.
I think sometimes enthusiasts lose sight of just how much gaming goes on in the mid-range.
That includes me, still rocking my GTX 460 1GB, but seriously need an upgrade. I was honestly hoping they would release the 960 Ti first like the 660 Ti did, or possibly simultaneously (like the GTX 460 768 and 1GB cards)...but no such luck
So, does anyone have any idea when the 960 Ti will be released? Given the way the rumor sites were gushing over multiple SKUs, I kinda felt like it would be a simultaneous release.
The 960 in the review is running much higher clocks than reference too.In the [H] evaluation, the 960 did better in several games against the 285 than I thought it would. I'm waiting for AT's review next week to see what compute performance is like.
In the [H] evaluation, the 960 did better in several games against the 285 than I thought it would. I'm waiting for AT's review next week to see what compute performance is like.
The 960 in the review is running much higher clocks than reference too.
I don't know if anyone watched the PCPerspective livestream on launch day (I didn't but watched the YT upload while I was waiting for the Win10 tech preview to download), but according to Tom Petersen the 960 is pretty much capped at 2GB in current shipping silicon. Don't know if this is set in stone, he is a PR guy after all. Let the QQ'ing and wailing & gnashing of teeth escalate...
Yeah, but it was tested against a similarly priced R9 285 running at higher clock speeds from the same manufacturer. Given the 285's 256-bit vs the 960's 128-bit memory bus, I don't think the comparison was unfair.The 960 in the review is running much higher clocks than reference too.
I did not say it was unfair and price had nothing to do with what I said either. I was simply saying that the large factory oc on the card makes it look faster than what it really is against the stock clocked competition.Yeah, but it was tested against a similarly priced R9 285 running at higher clock speeds from the same manufacturer. Given the 285's 256-bit vs the 960's 128-bit memory bus, I don't think the comparison was unfair.