Here's a little story. Personally, I've never been one for top of the line, high end GPU's. My PC is just over $1000 in cost/worth, non sentimentally. I'd been running an overclocked Nvidia Geforce GTX 460 for the longest time, as I never needed anything else to render any videos or run any games at less than medium settings, most of which were fine at max settings on my 1440x900 monitor. And I don't play every huge, AAA title that is super GPU intensive, so it definitely served my needs.
Enter Dark Souls III.
I love the Souls series, but they're generally known for their lack of... let's say... great PC ports. Dark Souls III was optimized for consoles, running at near consistent 30 fps on PS4 and Xbox One, both of which have less powerful hardware than I did [8-core dedicated CPU instead of APU, 16 gb RAM, etc]. Yet, on the lowest settings I couldn't manage more than 20 fps, with the average being around less than or equal to 10. I could only assume the Port didn't support older hardware. This was essentially my wake up call for a new Card.
Enter the GTX 950.
I've had this card for about 2 months, and I love it. It blows away my 460 in some regards, most notably DS3, which now runs averages of 60 fps, sometimes dipping to ~50, never below 40, all on basically maxed settings. It has handled everything I've thrown at it with nothing below 30 fps gaming-wise, and anything that drops down that low to begin with I can just tweak settings to get back up to 60+. I suppose this is to be expected, as this is a mid-range card. It won't run the latest and greatest AAA titles at ultra settings on 4K with 60fps, but it will run them astoundingly on medium-high settings at 1080p. If you're one of the people who's looking for that overachievement in performance, then maybe this isn't the card for you. But if you're even just a little more on the casual side of gaming, or if you just need something to render videos or graphics programs, this card will serve you well. It was definitely worth the ~$150 I spent on it.
The only complaint I have is something that I'm unsure of whether it was an individual problem to me or not. Which is that the VGA drivers mentioned in the instructions were not included with the card's install disk drivers. This made me unable to use my trusty 1440x900 monitor--which happened to be a VGA monitor--with the card, as it would constantly shut down for being unable to change to its native resolution. This forced me to have to also upgrade my monitor alongside the card [which is something I debatably should have done for a while now], to the new standard of 1080p, which is another upgrade I love, though I do have to say that I miss my old aspect ratio.
All in all, I would give the card a 4.9/5 [which is close enough to a 5], only losing .1 star for the inconvenience I had to go through for a week. It is a great card for the money, and the best mid range card I've ever had the pleasure of using.
| Max Screen Resolution | 4096 x 2160 |
|---|---|
| Memory Speed | 6610 MHz |
| Graphics Coprocessor | Nvidia |
| Chipset Brand | NVIDIA |
| Graphics Card Ram Size | 2 GB |
