The GeForce GTX 960 promises to be an excellent choice for home theater PCs with the ability to play back 4K video at low power, and natively supporting HDCP 2.2 content over HDMI 2.0. While the GeForce GTX 970 and 980 support H.265 (HEVC) video encoding, only the GeForce GTX 960 decodes this forward-looking format. One advantage the GM206 GPU holds over GM204 is its new video engine. By now, we’re well aware that the Maxwell architecture does more with less, so we expect the GeForce GTX 960 to keep up with its predecessor and compete aggressively with the Radeon. GeForce GTX 960 has fewer CUDA cores and texture units compared to the GeForce GTX 760, but that's partially offset by a higher core clock rate. Nvidia recommends a modest 450W power supply. A single 6-pin PCIe power cable is all this card requires. Its 120W ceiling is 50W lower than the GeForce GTX 760 it replaced and 70W below the Radeon R9 285. Maxwell established itself as the most efficient desktop graphics architecture, and GeForce GTX 960 continues the trend. For reference, the GeForce GTX 760 debuted at $250. This probably has a lot to do with today's estimated $200 price tag. Something else to consider: the 960’s less complex memory interface might give Nvidia more flexibility to lower prices in the future. There may be high-resolution settings where limited throughout could be a limiting factor though, and we’ll look for those in the benchmarks. And, based on what we’ve seen from the GeForce GTX 970 and 980, it probably is. Nvidia claims that the GeForce GTX 960’s third-generation color compression engine is efficient enough to make it competitive, despite less available bandwidth. Both the GeForce GTX 760 getting replaced and Radeon R9 285 it’s destined to fight feature 256-bit memory interfaces enabling 192.2 and 176GB of theoretical bandwidth, respectively. The elephant in the room is GeForce GTX 960’s 128-bit memory interface and 112.2GB/s of peak memory bandwidth.

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