The GeForce GTX 950 replaces the previous-generation GeForce GTX 750 Ti, one of the year's most popular cards thanks to its incredible price-performance proposition. The GTX 750 Ti and its slightly slower sibling, the GTX 750, were the first cards to launch on Nvidia's Maxwell architecture which has had a fantastic run since then. Maxwell-based cards are the coolest and least power-hungry in many, many years - in fact Maxwell has totally changed our expectations about how graphics cards at all levels should operate.
Now, we see further refinement with GeForce GTX 950, based on second-generation Maxwell. In fact this is the same GM206 GPU we've already seen as the GeForce GTX 960, just with some of its functions and bandwidth curtailed. Two of its eight arrays of execution units (which Nvidia calls "stream processors") have been disabled, for a total of 768 functional units as opposed to 1024. The clock speed varies between its base of 1024MHz and peak 1188MHz, which are also slight reductions compared to the GTX 960.
There's still 2GB of GDDR5 RAM on the same 128-bit memory bus. More interestingly, the peak power draw is down to just 90W. That means you should be able to get away with a very conservative power supply unit, and heat dissipation should be no problem at all even in the tight confines of a small-form-factor build.
Other points of interest include hardware H.265 video decoding, DirextX feature level 12.1 support, and HDMI 2.0 which supports 4K output. The GeForce GTX 950 should be able to drive four 4K displays simultaneously. On the software side of things, Nvidia has updated its GeForce Experience platform which allows easy gameplay recording and broadcasting as well as game streaming through a Web browser.
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 950
As expected, Gigabyte's GTX 950 offering is a diminutive card by today's standards. It measures just 208mm in length though it will still occupy two slots internally. It shouldn't have any trouble fitting into a budget PC cabinet though you will need at least a 350W power supply with one single 6-pin PCIe power connector.
This GPU shouldn't require any sort of elaborate cooling system but Gigabyte has still slapped two fans on it, and used its "Windforce" name on the box. This particular model, the GV-N950WF2OC-2GD (rev. 1.0) is actually slightly overclocked, with base and boost speeds set to 1102Mhz and 1279MHz respectively.
Performance
We plugged our Gigabyte GeForce GTX 950 sample card into a test machine with the following components:
Intel Core i7-4770K CPU at stock speeds
Asus Z97-Pro (Wi-Fi ac) motherboard
8GB of Kingston 1600MHz RAM
120GB Kingston HyperX Fury SSD
Cooler Master Hyper 212X CPU cooler
Corsair RM650 power supply
Dell U2711 1440p monitor
Windows 8.1
The first thing we noticed was how quiet the card was even with both fans spinning. Driver installation was painless and we were up and running in no time. We first ran through a set of synthetic benchmarks which run the card through various modern-day scenes which involve physics and complex effects. First off was 3DMark, which gave us a score of 5,930 overall in the Fire Strike base test, which is optimised for 1080p workloads. We also tried pushing this card with the 1440p Fire Strike Extreme test, which resulted in a score of 3,006 and relatively less smooth video.
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