- Aug 30, 2012
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Editor's Note: Due to personal matters we won’t have a GeForce GTX 960 review published today. But in lieu of that we wanted to go over the basics of NVIDIA’s latest Maxwell card
With the launch of their first Maxwell GPUs just under a year ago, NVIDIA has by all accounts set themselves up on a solid trajectory for this generation of video cards. Maxwell has proven to be a sturdy GPU architecture, delivering strong performance alongside class-leading power efficiency. NVIDIA’s semi-refresh of Maxwell back in September for the “second generation” Maxwell GM2xx family (GTX 980 and GTX 970) served to further improve NVIDIA’s offerings, coupling Maxwell with a battery of new features for existing and future games alike.
So far we have seen NVIDIA release Maxwell into the low-end/mainstream market with the GTX 750 series, and then go after the high-end of the market with the GTX 980 and GTX 970. The last remaining piece of the puzzle for Maxwell is what comes between those two markets, the enthusiast market, typically served by NVIDIA’s x60 parts. Now just a bit over 4 months after NVIDIA’s launch into the high-end market, NVIDIA is back with their latest Maxwell GPU and latest video cards to do battle for the enthusiast market.
Launching today is the GeForce GTX 960 and the GM206 GPU. Following in the established traditions of the x60 video cards, NVIDIA is looking to reestablish their place in the enthusiast video card market with their latest offering. With GTX 980 and GTX 970 targeted at the 4K and 1440p markets, GTX 960 is in turn designed to be NVIDIA’s high-end 1080p card, capable of running most games with maximum (or near maximum) image quality at the still most common desktop resolution of 1920x1080. To do this they have brought down Maxwell 2 into GM206, a new, smaller GPU tailored for this market segment.
Read more at AnandTech