Nvidia GTX 950 launches for $160

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 border-less 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.