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Nvidia's GeForce GTX 970 took no prisoners, reshaping the high-end desktop graphics market by outperforming both AMD's R9 290 and its top-end 290X, brutally under-cutting both with an excellent price-point. Its only drawback? At around £250, the value on offer was - and is - tremendous, but that's still a hefty outlay for a graphics card, its charms remaining out of reach for the majority of PC gamers. All eyes were on Nvidia to deliver the same kind of seismic shift to the GPU market at the £150-£180 sweet spot. The bad news? GTX 960 doesn't offer the same kind of mindboggling value as its pricier sibling. The good news? It's keenly priced for its position in the marketplace, offering competitive - though not exactly spectacular - performance. Despite its lack of a killer edge, the GTX 960 shouldn't be written off - it has charms of its own that AMD cannot offer, particularly in terms of power efficiency. With a 120W TDP and a relatively meagre power draw, this card runs cooler and quieter than its competition, draining far less juice from the mains. Even running in concert with an overclocked Core i7 CPU, total system power consumption is still under 200W - a remarkable achievement.
The arrival of the GTX 960 sees the debut of a new mid-range graphics core based on the Maxwell architecture, dubbed GM206, fabricated on the existing, mature 28nm process and featuring eight SMM CUDA core clusters for a total of 1024 processors. That's up against 2048 cores in the top-end GTX 980, and 1664 found in the GTX 970. ROPs are pared back from 64 to 32, while the memory interface is compromised too - there's a 128-bit interface here as opposed to the 256-bit version found in the higher-end cards.
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