Nvidia GeForce GTX 950 review

The card

As with other recent mid-range launches, Nvidia hasn’t developed a GTX 950 reference card for the media to test. Instead, it has let its board partners supply their own cards, which use custom coolers and out-of-the-box overclocks. The EVGA GTX 950 2GB SSC is no different; the 256mm-long card is easily one of the biggest GTX 950s currently available, and it needs its bulk to make room for the twin-fan ACX heatsink.

If you’ve got the room inside your case for the large card, however, there’s no denying the cooling system is effective. The fans don’t spin up at all until the GPU hits 60 degrees C, meaning that it’s completely silent on the Windows desktop and even when playing less demanding games. The fans didn’t spin up to noticeable levels at any point during our testing, with the three-heatpipe heatsink proving incredibly effective at taking heat away from the GPU without serious intervention from the fans.

The EVGA card’s base clock has been pushed up from 1,024MHz to 1,190MHz and the boost clock has been increased from 1,188MHz to 1,393MHz, roughly a 15% improvement over Nvidia’s reference design. The memory also gets a small 10MHz push to 6,610MHz effective.

EVGA clearly intends gamers to overclock its GPUs, as it includes the comprehensive PrecisionX software utility in the box for tweaking clock speeds and voltages within Windows. It has also fitted an 8-pin PCI-Express connector, rather than the standard 6-pin, in order to ensure the card gets enough power once overclocked. There’s even a toggle switch on the card to alternate between two graphics BIOS chips, which contain different fan profiles for more effective cooling at higher clock speeds. It’s almost overkill for a card aimed at 1080p gaming, but you can at least be sure that cooling is sufficient regardless of your clock speeds.

Performance

The GTX 950 is performs brilliantly at 1,920×1,080, as long as you’re realistic with detail settings and anti-aliasing – after all, this is a sub-£150 graphics card. We saw a perfectly smooth 71.9fps in Dirt Showdown, and while 39.1fps in Tomb Raider is an improvement over the Xbox One version’s capped 30fps, swapping out the very demanding super sampling anti-aliasing (SSAA) for the less resource-hungry FXAA resulted in 77.5fps. The GPU-intense Metro: Last Light Redux was just below what we’d judge playable with SSAA enabled, averaging 26.6fps, but disabling it and dropping tessellation and texture details from maximum to high boosted the frame rate considerably to 64.9fps. We’ve yet to publish our AMD Radeon R9 370 review, but based on our early benchmark results the GTX 950’s closest competitor is between 5% and 10% slower across the board in our chosen game tests.

At higher resolutions, you may not be able to run the latest games at their highest graphical details and stay above 60fps, but if you’re prepared to make a few detail level compromises, gaming at 2,560×1,440 is certainly possible. Unsurprisingly, the four-year-old Dirt Showdown fared best at this resolution, with 50.4fps, meaning you only have to disable anti-aliasing to get over 60fps. Tomb Raider wasn’t far behind, though; we saw 47.8fps with FXAA enabled, a big improvement over the 22.5fps average with SSAA turned on. Metro was the toughest challenge, as with SSAA enabled we only saw 14.8fps. Turning this off helped improve things to a just-playable 29.2fps. Again, the GTX 950 outperforms the Radeon R9 370, although the gap begins to close in seriously demanding games like Metro.

This card isn’t meant to cope with 4K resolution gaming, even if it will happily play 4K video. None of our test titles broke the 30fps ‘playable’ barrier at our preferred detail settings, although Dirt Showdown came close at 26.9fps. Disabling anti-aliasing and dropping detail levels to High actually resulted in a perfectly playable 67.3fps. Both Tomb Raider and Metro plummeted to single-figure frame rates, but this is mainly down to the use of super-sampling anti-aliasing. We eventually got a playable 48.2fps frame rate out of Tomb Raider by dropping all details to High and forcing off Tessellation, but Metro wasn’t playable at anything above minimal quality settings. Interestingly the AMD Radeon R9 370 pulls ahead slightly in Tomb Raider at this resolution, although the frame rate is still in single figures.

Conclusion

At roughly £130 depending on factory overclocks and third-party coolers, the GTX 950 is looking like an absolute bargain for anyone looking to game at 1,920×1,080 for the foreseeable future. AMD’s R9 370 costs roughly the same, yet at the time of writing, it was consistently slower in all our tests. It also uses significantly more power than the energy-efficient GTX 950, and lacks HDMI 2.0 for 4K output at 60fps.

Nvidia has proved yet again just how effective its Maxwell GPU architecture can be, even when the number of CUDA cores and clock speeds are reduced in order to keep the price as low as possible. The GTX 950 is easily able to deliver smooth frame rates at 1,920×1,080. You’ll need to sacrifice anti-aliasing and possibly drop detail settings to stay above 60fps in the newest titles, but considering the price this is a minor concession to make. If £150 is your limit for buying a graphics card, the GTX 950 is a superb buy.