NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 Reference and Overclocked Performance Revealed – Performs Slightly Faster Than Radeon R9 280

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 Reference and Overclocked Performance Revealed – Performs Slightly Faster Than Radeon R9 280

As expected, the first performance benchmarks of NVIDIA’s upcoming GeForce GTX 960 have been leaked by PCEVA. It seems like the GeForce GTX 960 which is going to hit the price point of around $199 US will rival the Radeon R9 280 (Tahiti Pro) in terms of performance numbers which are currently being shown however the performance numbers shouldn’t be indicative of the final product since NVIDIA will be shipping final products with new performance drivers once the card launches.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 Reference and Overclocked 3DMark Performance Leaked

Senior member of PCEVA, RoyalK, had the opportunity to post some NDA data from his review over at the PCEVA forums. From the looks of it, the GeForce GTX 960 which features the GM206-300 chip will feature not only a sweet price point but some decent performance for a card that costs around 200 bucks and features a 2 GB VRAM operating across a 128-bit memory bus. While the specifications listed in the GPU-z shot seem to be bogus due to the current version not fully supporting the GeForce GTX 960 graphics card, some information does seem to indicate that we might be looking at 1024 CUDA cores on the GM206-300 GPU along with 32 ROPs and if the math seems right, around 64 TMUs but we’ll leave it here until more credible information pops up. Regardless of the information, GPU-z does seem to indicate the right memory specifications of 2 GB VRAM, 128-bit memory bus and 112.2 GB/s bandwidth.

Now we have already seen that the card will make use of a reference design that is similar to the GeForce GTX 670 and GeForce GTX 760 graphics card however, it will come with just one 6-Pin connector while custom and overclocked models will feature dual 6-Pin or a single 8-Pin connector configuration. Display outputs will come as the standard layout of DVI, HDMI and three display ports however, custom models may switch over to other display configurations as they see fit. The card will ship with just one SLI goldfinger that indicates towards a 2-Way SLI multi-GPU functionality. The maximum TDP of the board is suggested around 120W. Do note that the card being used in this performance test is actually a custom variant.


Coming to the performance, the card was currently tested in just 3DMark synthetic benchmarks and the scores speak for themselves as whether the card is a buy for you or not. These are just early benchmarks so don’t take them so seriously as reviews are still a few days away. As the score posted below reveal, the GeForce GTX 960 manages to score P9960 in 3DMark 11 performance mode and X3321 in 3DMark 11 Extreme mode. A reference Radeon R9 280 scores around 9000-9500 3DMarks in performance and 2900-3100 in extreme mode. Similar gains can be seen in 3DMark Firestrike with the card scoring 6636 marks on default mode, 3438 marks in Extreme mode and 1087 marks in 4K ultra mode which is ridiculous for such a card. When overclocked, the card scores 7509 marks in the default 3DMark Firestrike benchmark at clock speed of 1398/1461 MHz up from reference speeds of 1228/1291 MHz.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 Rumored Specifications:

Model	GeForce GTX 980	GeForce GTX 970	GeForce GTX 960	GeForce GTX 970M	GeForce GTX 980M
Architecture	Maxwell	Maxwell	Maxwell	Maxwell	Maxwell
GPU	GM204	GM204	GM206	GM204	GM204
CUDA cores	2048	1664	1024	1280	1536
Texture Units	128	104	64	80	96
Raster Devices	64	64	32	48	64
Clock Speed	1126/1216 MHz	1051/1178 MHz	~1178 MHz Preliminary	924 MHz	1038 MHz
Memory Bus	256-bit	256-bit	128-bit	192-bit	256-bit
Amount of memory	4 GB GDDR5	4 GB GDDR5	2-4 GB GDDR5	3.6 GB GDDR5	8.4 GB GDDR5
Memory Frequency	7010 MHz	7010 MHz	7010 MHz	5000 MHz	5000 MHz
Memory Bandwidth	224 GB / s	224 GB / s	112 GB/S	120 GB / s	160 GB / s
TDP	165W	147W	120W	~	~
Price	$549 US	$329 US	$199US?	~	~

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 Performance Benchmarks: