It’s possible we’ll be seeing Nvidia’s mid range GTX 960 launching next month, at the Consumer Electronics Show (perhaps better known as CES) taking place in Las Vegas.
You might recall that the GM204 based boards used the codename of PG401. Now, another board has popped up – this by the name of PG301. Surely a great indicator it’s the codename for Nvidia’s GTX 960 Graphics card.
Less certain are the specifications of the card. For reference, 128 CUDA cores are contained inside each of the SMM clusters inside the cards GPU, so this means the GTX 980, for example, has a total of 2048 CUDA cores and 16 SMM’s, but the he 970 features only 13 SMM’s, leaving only 1664 CUDA cores.
If we use this same pattern, it’s possible we’ll see only 1,280 CUDA cores for the GeForce 960, or 10 SMM’s if you prefer. Regarding memory bandwidth and size – it’s possible we’ll be seeing either a 128-bit or a 192-bit interface, with either 2 or 3GB VRAM. I think many in the GPU market would agree that 2GB isn’t really ideal – and if you’re planning on SLIing the cards in the future (for higher resolutions) clearly more RAM is preferable.
It likely won’t be long until we start hearing more solid details – including the cards price range, which is also a mystery. We can of course, make educated guesses based on the history of Nvidia’s other x60 parts, which would put this one at around the 250-300 US dollars price range.
A big concern is that this puts the card against very stiff competition from AMD – considering that AMD are being super aggressive with the pricing of their various parts. Both the R9 290, 290X and R9 295X2 have all seen rather steep price cuts at the higher end, and even the 285 and other such GPU’s have seen price reductions too.
Tor be totally blunt, for $300 you’re able to pick up the R9 290 from Amazon – and while we don’t have benchmarks of the GTX 960 yet, it’s clear it’ll be very hard pressed to compete with the R9 290. Particularly true when the 290 is only a few frames slower than the GTX 970.
As usual, watch this space!
Source: SweClockers
