As rumored, Nvidia is releasing the Nvidia GTX 950 today for $160, positioning it between the previous-gen $120 GTX 750 Ti and the $200 GTX 960. Nvidia’s aiming the 950 at the MOBA crowd, championing it as a great graphics card for League of Legends and Dota 2 players.
To bolster that claim, Nvidia is building some specific optimization profiles into GeForce Experience for MOBAs to reduce latency with the GTX 950. Where Nvidia typically buffers two frames ahead in the DirectX pipeline, its “low latency” profiles for MOBAs on the 950 will reduce that to one frame. That, along with configuring a game in fullscreen (rather than borderless windowed) and the Maxwell architecture’s overall performance improvements bringe latency in rendering an image down to 45 milliseconds, compared to 80 milliseconds on the GTX 650.
To be clear, those tweaks were already possible through the Nvidia Control Panel, but obviously required digging through some settings and knowing your way around some specific optimizations. Nvidia's now going to surface those options in GFE and offer some one-click "low latency" profiles for games like LoL and Dota 2.
That’s Nvidia’s pitch for the GTX 950; now let’s look at some numbers.
| Specs | 650 | 750 Ti | 950 | 960 |
| GDDR5 RAM | 1GB | 2GB | 2GB | 2GB |
| CUDA Cores | 384 | 640 | 768 | 1024 |
| Base clock | 1058 MHz | 1020 | 1024 MHz | 1126 MHz |
| Boost clock | -- | 1085 | 1188 MHz | 1178 MHz |
| Memory clock | 5 GHz | 5.4 GHz | 6.6 GHz | 7 GHz |
| Texture units | 32 | 40 | 48 | 64 |
| ROP units | 16 | 16 | 32 | 32 |
| TDP | 64W | 60W | 90W | 120W |
| Launch price | $110 | $150 (now $120) | $160 | $200 |
The GTX 950 supports DirectX features at Feature Level 12_1, which should make it forward compatible with any DX12 games that come down the pipe.
Alongside its announcement of the GTX 950, Nvidia also showed off some new sharing and streaming features coming to GeForce Experience in a near-future update. We've been testing the GTX 950, and should have more soon on how it compares to the 960 and last year's 750 Ti.
