NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 Specs Confirmed

[HumanSmoke]

H265/VP9 are mainly for the 4k 10bit 4:2:0+ standard. You do have the option for lower or higher quality options.
You could let the CPU do the work load and still be crippled by your 8bit GPU.
Content True H265/VP9 4k 10bit 4:2:0+ -> Processing CPU/GPU if your GPU is processing it at 8bit out your already downgrading the quality before it gets to your panel.

So, you're still sticking with your assertion then?

For full H265/VP9 you have to get Radeon HD 6xx0 or newer....

As for the GTX 960...not on my shopping list, but hopefully it causes some price realignments across both vendors cards that benefit the consumer.
An interesting snippet in the source article - One million GTX 970/980's sold so far. An impressive number given their pricing and sales over barely three months.

 

[Petey Plane]

only 2gb of vram for a 2015 card... LOL

you do realize this is a 1080p card right? 2gb is more than enough for that resolution.

 

[MxPhenom 216]

you do realize this is a 1080p card right? 2gb is more than enough for that resolution.

Not only that but its a mid range GPU.

 

[Petey Plane]

Not only that but its a mid range GPU.

yeah, people complaining that a sub $200 card won't be able to hit 60fps in FarCry 4 on ultra on a 4k screen really should maybe find another hobby, because they obviously don't get this one.

 

[dj-electric]

Personally - im already hitting the wall in 1440P with my 3GB GPU. With arma, BF4 and many games going over 2750MB in use.

I would have seeing mid-range cards with 3GB or more. I guess that a 4GB GTX 960 is just a question of time for those SLIing people

 

[rruff]

Personally - im already hitting the wall in 1440P with my 3GB GPU. With arma, BF4 and many games going over 2750MB in use.

Vram used and vram *needed* are two different things.

 

[GhostRyder]

If its like all other GeForce cards it wont. Tegra X1 supports 10bit making it possible to be fully 4k compliant. GeForces are all 8bit. Decoding and encoding will still work.

For full H265/VP9 you have to get Radeon HD 6xx0 or newer, FirePro or Quadro card
through DP 1.2+ or HDMI 1.4+.

Content->Processing->Panel

Might this be what your referring to? Have not thought about it yet but I had not seen full support for it until you mentioned it but now I am interested in it. Otherwise let me know what your referring to as I would like to know and give it a whirl.

The GTX 960 is a mid range card and as I said before having 2gb with the new compression system makes up for it any how and should be enough for anyone playing 1080p games. Not sure I would expect it to contain a vast feature set and extreme amount of ram for the price though I guess having at least 1gb more VRAM would be better if your looking to SLI though I doubt it would make much of a difference.

 

[dj-electric]

Vram used and vram *needed* are two different things.

I choose to need more.

 

[Fluffmeister]

I choose to need more.

Good for you, clearly the GTX 960 isn't for you.

 

[Casecutter]

WTF they compare it to a GTX660 why not the GTX760?

Yea, the GTX 660 (GK106) was a dud on so many levels, so not working against any High bar. When they say it "great OC'n" that means all you'll see are custom specials (perhaps 2x 6-pins) for the normal increase. Is anyone holding any hope there will be reference cards? And when did folks start considering $200 the point as "Budget" Gaming?

That said I think it will find many homes only because AMD has nothing new on the horizon, and at best lower price of 285/280X won't stir people. AMD seems real late in thwarting the frenzy and that's clearly their problem.

 

[rruff]

I choose to need more.

What I mean is that it's gratuitous usage. It's used simply because you have it available, and it would run fine on the same settings if you had less... probably. Like when I open Firefox and Chrome together they suck up most of my 8GB of ram... but they don't need it.

 

[Tonduluboy]

In my country 1 store listed this card price 960 gigabyte $30 cheaper than Ref 970, feel bad for those who dont have $30 to buy 970

 

[HumanSmoke]

What I mean is that it's gratuitous usage. It's used simply because you have it available, and it would run fine on the same settings if you had less... probably. Like when I open Firefox and Chrome together they suck up most of my 8GB of ram... but they don't need it.

Yup. There can be a big difference in memory allocation vs actual memory usage. There are also plenty of instances where memory allocation not only reserves all the vRAM (minus required buffers) but exceeds the capacity of the vRAM since OGL seems quite happy to reserve system RAM as well as vRAM.

Might this be what your referring to? Have not thought about it yet but I had not seen full support for it until you mentioned it but now I am interested in it. Otherwise let me know what your referring to as I would like to know and give it a whirl.

It's a third party plug-in that can work but doesn't have full support (and no VP9 support). Incidentally, the AMD download states " This version supports the OpenCL devices like AMD HD 5000 and above discrete GPUs..." that also includes Nvidia cards (Kepler and Maxwell at least), but like most (if not all) OCL based H.265 encode at present, is as slow as blood in a dead man's veins.

 

[Xzibit]

Might this be what your referring to? Have not thought about it yet but I had not seen full support for it until you mentioned it but now I am interested in it. Otherwise let me know what your referring to as I would like to know and give it a whirl.

The GTX 960 is a mid range card and as I said before having 2gb with the new compression system makes up for it any how and should be enough for anyone playing 1080p games. Not sure I would expect it to contain a vast feature set and extreme amount of ram for the price though I guess having at least 1gb more VRAM would be better if your looking to SLI though I doubt it would make much of a difference.

I was going off the assumption that if you had a GeForce in the system even an older one you would be able to decode or encode thru software or hybrid be it if your CPU is fast enough or GPU is supported but the output would be dumb down to 8bit output even if the original content was 10bit and you had a 10bit panel.

There is also this.. PCWorld - New Intel graphics driver adds 4K video support, Chrome video acceleration and more

The only one not doing 10bit out is Nvidia GeForce.

EDIT:
*added GeForce before someone decides to try and troll like usual.

 

[xorbe]

Opportunity missed, I think 170.6-bit sounds more impressive than lying about 9.3 GHz vram. (You either get this joke, or you don't ...)

 

[GhostRyder]

It's a third party plug-in that can work but doesn't have full support (and no VP9 support). Incidentally, the AMD download states " This version supports the OpenCL devices like AMD HD 5000 and above discrete GPUs..." that also includes Nvidia cards (Kepler and Maxwell at least), but like most (if not all) OCL based H.265 encode at present, is as slow as blood in a dead man's veins.

Was I speaking to you?

I was going off the assumption that if you had a GeForce in the system even an older one you would be able to decode or encode thru software or hybrid be it if your CPU is fast enough or GPU is supported but the output would be dumb down to 8bit output even if the original content was 10bit and you had a 10bit panel.

There is also this.. PCWorld - New Intel graphics driver adds 4K video support, Chrome video acceleration and more

The only one not doing 10bit out is Nvidia GeForce.

EDIT:
*added GeForce before someone decides to try and troll like usual.

Oh I see what your saying now, sorry misinterpretation on my part. I had actually forgotten about that to be honest as it was something I just did not have to think about on a daily basis.

In my country 1 store listed this card price 960 gigabyte $30 cheaper than Ref 970, feel bad for those who dont have $30 to buy 970

Well I hope its at least a little bit more cheaper than that otherwise I think the obvious choice would be a GTX 970 lol.

 

[Rowsol]

only 2gb of vram for a 2015 card... LOL

@ 1080 there's no need for more.

This card is going to be killer. If the price/perfrmance is better than the 970 it will be insane.

 

[ptmmac]

I am wondering whether the switch to PCI 3.0 is part of why there has been so much of a drop in required bit width in Video cards. Is 128 bit on a 3.0 PCI equal to 256 bit or is it just the video compression they are running? Video compression is not necessarily a bad thing especially if it greatly reduces the power and expense of running an nVidia card. The other question here is will there be support for SLI on this card? Good overclocking, low power requirements and good support for SLI would make this card a low cost and upgradeable path for the next 3 years.

 

[Winston_008]

Yea, the GTX 660 (GK106) was a dud on so many levels, so not working against any High bar. When they say it "great OC'n" that means all you'll see are custom specials (perhaps 2x 6-pins) for the normal increase. Is anyone holding any hope there will be reference cards? And when did folks start considering $200 the point as "Budget" Gaming?

That said I think it will find many homes only because AMD has nothing new on the horizon, and at best lower price of 285/280X won't stir people. AMD seems real late in thwarting the frenzy and that's clearly their problem.

How was the gtx 660 a dud on so many levels?

 

[HumanSmoke]

I am wondering whether the switch to PCI 3.0 is part of why there has been so much of a drop in required bit width in Video cards. Is 128 bit on a 3.0 PCI equal to 256 bit or is it just the video compression they are running?

It's the latter - the delta (colour) compression. PCI-E bandwidth for single cards is for communication between the graphics card and CPU computation/system memory. Data movement depends upon the app/game's CPU requirement, but the PCI-E lanes wouldn't become saturated before CPU coding stalls or writing to/retrieving from system memory become the limiting factor. The internal bus width (GPU <-> vRAM) is the more important factor. Colour compression, like any other form of data compression allows for faster data transfer.
As for bus width drops, that isn't necessarily the case. Third/fourth tier GPUs have historically been 128-bit for some time ( AMD's Juniper HD 57x0/67x0, Bonaire and Cape Verde HD 77xx/R7 260) while Nvidia often compromised with 192-bit to offset slower GDDR3/GDDR5 frequencies before they got their memory controller act together.
As the low end discrete graphics market basically evaporates, it also puts more pressure on the next tier up the product stack to remain cost effective, so die size becomes a significant factor as does getting a good return on investment - which is why both AMD and Nvidia's product stacks look less than easy to categorize. Nvidia's present range includes architectures from three architectures (Fermi, Kepler, Maxwell), and AMD five.

The other question here is will there be support for SLI on this card?

Yes. The SLI finger can be clearly seen in this MSI GTX 960

Was I speaking to you?

Well, if you were asking for information from a just a single individual, why post on a public forum rather than PM the person concerned? Sorry I provided the information as opposed to your BFF - no need to go all...

 

[darkangel0504]

that game is also terrible so who cares.

game of the year is terrible ???

 

[silapakorn]

It hits the shelves today in my country, at 300$ a piece.
I feel bad for those who can't afford 970.

 

[xorbe]

It's the latter - the delta (colour) compression.

They might even be keeping the textures compressed on the host side, resulting in faster host to gfx card transfers. (Probably are.)

 

[HumanSmoke]

They might even be keeping the textures compressed on the host side, resulting in faster host to gfx card transfers. (Probably are.)

Yeah, I think it works both with writing/retrieving from system RAM, and also from client vRAM to the texture address units of the GPU.

It hits the shelves today in my country, at 300$ a piece.
I feel bad for those who can't afford 970.

Ouch! Sounds like some serious pre-release price gouging (unless all other cards are carrying the same kind of mark-up).
If they're on the shelves, how about some quick phone pictures for us?

 

[GhostRyder]

Well, if you were asking for information from a just a single individual, why post on a public forum rather than PM the person concerned? Sorry I provided the information as opposed to your BFF - no need to go all...

Don't care, stop obsessing and throwing a tantrum.

@ 1080 there's no need for more.

This card is going to be killer. If the price/perfrmance is better than the 970 it will be insane.

I agree, mostly it's the color compression that makes the 2gb enough for a card like this which is going to be a sweet 1080p card. I do not doubt there will be 4gb variants for those who want to make sure/go for sli and 1440p on a budget (so long as the price stays with predictions) but 1 of these is what I look forward to seeing in action.