discussion NVIDIA GTX 960 Reference Review Comment Thread

[SKYMTL]

NVIDIA's GTX 960 has been reviewed over an over again in its pre-overlcocked form but now we take a reference design for a spin at 1080P and 1440P. The performance results are interesting to say the least.

Read more: http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/foru...ws/68697-nvidia-gtx-960-reference-review.html

Wrote this conclusion about 5 times but it's 100% the truth. :thumb:

 

[gomer5000]

too bad i was waiting for this one for my htpc but looks like ill be waiting or going higher end.

 

[moocow]

I'm itching to upgrade my Galaxy 570 MTD but 970 is about $200 more which is hard to swallow. I look forward to the next round up review to see if the factory overclock ones worth the money. 960 Ti by the end of this year maybe?

 

[Bond007]

Seems great if you know its going to be a 1080p card (assuming pricing is competetive with AMD at the time of purchase). Otherwise its not what I would have hoped. Fingers crossed a 960Ti comes around to tidy this up.

 

[Bond007]

NVIDIA's GTX 960 has been reviewed over an over again in its pre-overlcocked form but now we take a reference design for a spin at 1080P and 1440P. The performance results are interesting to say the least.

Read more: http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/foru...ws/68697-nvidia-gtx-960-reference-review.html

Wrote this conclusion about 5 times but it's 100% the truth. :thumb:

I appreciate the honest conclusion.

One question...did something change in the Metro last night test? AMD cards seem to flop there, where they didn't in past tests that seem to be the same.

Original 280x review:
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/foru...ws/63522-amd-radeon-r9-280x-3gb-review-8.html

gtx 960 review:
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/foru...68697-nvidia-gtx-960-reference-review-13.html

Level and settings are listed as the same, and the performance of the gtx 760 appears to be nearly identical in both. However, the 280x is competetive with the 760 in the old review, but gets destroyed by it in the new review.

 

[Fragman]

SKYMTL I have to appreciate you for calling this card's weaknesses out. imo VRAM is the big problem given that most recent games like AC Unity, Middle Earth, Lords of the Fallen, COD AW, Dying Light and Evolve are easily using more than 2GB even at 1080p. Both Nvidia (GTX 960) and AMD (R9 285) dropped the ball on their last product releases in the USD 200 - 250 segment. Frankly 3GB is the new minimum for 1080p and thats why R9 280 and R9 280X are still great cards. Hopefully AMD does not repeat the same mistake with the R9 3xx cards.

Also SKY it might help to include CRYENGINE games into your suite. You used to have Crysis 3 but that has been replaced by newer titles like Dragon Age Inquisition, Farcry 4 and Dying Light. Older games like Tombraider or Hitman can make way for new titles. CRYENGINE is one of the widely licensed cutting edge game engines and is known to be powering Star Citizen. Game titles based on CRYENGINE are crucial for evaluating GPUs in 2015. GTX 960 perf in CRYENGINE based games like Ryse and Evolve is not so good. Evolve in particular hammers the GTX 960 as it gets beaten by R9 270X. Nvidia even had a Evolve Game Ready driver which was used for testing. This kind of perf is not a good sign for a new card like GTX 960.

Ryse

Gigabyte GTX 960 G1 Gaming 2 GB Review | techPowerUp
Test ? GeForce GTX 960 - Le comptoir du hardware

Evolve

Snabbtest: Grafikprestanda i Evolve - Spel - SweClockers.com
Evolve im Technik-Test: Schicke Sci-Fi-Grafik mit Hang zur Speichervöllerei - auch auf der Geforce GTX 970
Evolve-Benchmarks: 14 Grafikkarten im Vergleich - ComputerBase

 

[SKYMTL]

So there are a number of things to take into account. Crysis was originally included but I realized that my pre-release copy hadn't received the last update which pretty much invalidates its results. There was something about early review Hunter Edition copies getting cut off from the normal update string that hasn't been resolved. I haven't come around to buying another copy to be honest and I didn't want to publish erroneous results.

As for Evolve, I don't think I'll ever include it due to the entirely random nature of combat. Sure you can do a run-through with bots but combat is necessary to highlight the "worse case" scenario and again....it is so random that repeatable results are impossible. I'm not sure how other sites accomplished their benchmarks.....

 

[Fragman]

So there are a number of things to take into account. Crysis was originally included but I realized that my pre-release copy hadn't received the last update which pretty much invalidates its results. There was something about early review Hunter Edition copies getting cut off from the normal update string that hasn't been resolved. I haven't come around to buying another copy to be honest and I didn't want to publish erroneous results.

As for Evolve, I don't think I'll ever include it due to the entirely random nature of combat. Sure you can do a run-through with bots but combat is necessary to highlight the "worse case" scenario and again....it is so random that repeatable results are impossible. I'm not sure how other sites accomplished their benchmarks.....

So do you plan to bring back Crysis 3 (with the latest updates) or any other recent CRYENGINE game like Ryse into your suite. It would be useful to evaluate how the latest cards perform in recent CRYENGINE games as high profile games like Star Citizen, Kingdom Deliverance using CRYENGINE are lined up for 2015/2016.

CryEngine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[SKYMTL]

Despite using the same engine, good performance in one of those games certainly does not guarantee good performance in another as developers are free to modify the engine to suit their purposes.

One good example: Ubisoft's Dunia engine. It is at heart a heavily modified version of CryEngine but utilizes completely different back-end metrics to achieve many effects.

Another example is the wide variety of performance differences between games like Lichdom: Battlemage, Enemy Front and Crysis 3. All of those used the same engine but performed completely differently.

Using Crysis 3 again would be a step backwards since it utilizes the engine's third version rather than the newer fourth generation.

All of that being said, I can't see adding another CryEngine game to the lineup for the time being as Evolve is still getting updates (supposedly a large graphics update will come in March / April with GameWorks features) and the others like Homefront: The Revolution are still in development.

 

[Casecutter]

"100% the truth"... and accurate and appreciate that you put it out there! I’d say such reference cards are actually the sensible purchase, especially if Nvidia went even further on price. Consider as the GK206 is smaller than Tonga by like 37%, and only hair larger than AMD's Curacao (and yes Maxwell is slightly more money as Nvidia uses a higher process variant), there's room for Nvidia to be more aggressive. <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" /><o></o>
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I also would like your thoughts on what Bond007 discussed above. I also noticed that huge uncharacteristic slump in Metro Last Light, I knew a while back AMD with new a driver release had Metro functioning on par with Nvidia? It almost looks as though some patch A4 Games killed AMD offering some erroneous results (today), I'm not sure it should be published as dependable data.