Hands-on with the Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 and Acer XB270HU monitor

Thursday was a big day for Nvidia, who continued rolling out more of their latest line of GeForce GTX cards. Following the September release of the GTX 970 and 980, Nvidia is now focusing on the midrange PC user with the new GTX 960. This will be a decidedly more affordable way to pick up the Maxwell GPU, with cards hovering around the $199 mark.

Interestingly, the GTX 960 won't be built on the same foundation as the GTX 970 and 980 cards. Rather than run on the latter's GM204 design, the GTX 960 is being built on the GM 206 CPU, which houses 1,024 cores, a base clock of 1127 MHZ, 2GB memory, and a 128-bit bus. This firmly puts the GTX 960 in the midrange camp, compared to the 970 and 980 specs. But even as a midrange card, the GTX 960 will offer some eye-opening features. The ability to support the upcoming Microsoft DirectX 12 should sound enticing to PC users, as will HDMI 2.0 support and full H.265 encoding and decoding.

Following a presentation from Nvidia regarding its upcoming plans, particular yesterday's expansion of Multi-Framed Sample Anti-Aliasing (MFAA) support across DirectX 10 and DirectX 11 titles, I was invited to try out the GTX 960 for myself. What struck me right away was that I was immediately told that Far Cry 4 had been running on a nearby machine through the past 20 minutes. It was hard to notice, because the machine was deathly silent, further demonstrating the GTX 960's "silent operation" feature. The card uses a low 120 watts, offering better performance for less than the GTX 660's 140 watts.

Next came time to try out the card for myself on the upcoming 2560x1440 Acer XB270HU monitor, which is being touted as the "world's first 144Hz IPS G-SYNC monitor." I first tried out the aforementioned Far Cry 4 and began journeying through Kyrat, giving the card as much of a stress test as possible. At Ultra settings, the game ran at a solid 50-60 fps on a 2560x1440 resolution throughout my time with it and screen tears were nowhere to be found. Once MFAA was switched on, textures smoothed out further without compromising frame rate. On top of running at a consistently high frame rate in Far Cry 4, I noticed a far greater boost in a more established game: Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Counter-Strike: GO ran at well over 140 frames and played far more fluidly than anything I had tried in the past, especially with the monitor's 144Hz refresh rate. Nvidia is aiming to bring out the best visuals in established games through their new cards, particularly aiming for the eSports market by shooting to optimize games like League of Legends and Dota 2.

Those that are currently rocking a GTX 760 will see little improvement with the 960. Some of our Chatty posters, like Junktown, have observed a negligible difference between the two cards, making the case for an upgrade tough. Rather the 960 is meant to be an upgrade for those stuck on older GTX models, like the 560 or 660. Nvidia estimates the 960 will last several years, noting that overclocking will not be required for recent games or for a handful of the 2015 PC gaming lineup. There are bound to be question marks down the line, like the extremely demanding The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, but the GTX 960 will come with native GeForce Experience support, which will contain a setting to automatically optimize your PC games.

The GeForce GTX 960 is available now. With Shacknews' readership largely comprised of PC gamers, if you've tried this card out, leave your impressions in the comments. We will look to re-visit the topic of the GTX 960 soon, following reader impressions. Meanwhile, the Acer XB270HU monitor is expected to arrive in February with pre-orders set to open before the end of January.

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?