We’ve known for a couple months now that NVIDIA is planning to release a couple lower-end Maxwell 2 GPUs; namely, the GTX 950 and 950 Ti. Currently, AMD’s graphics cards only support feature level 11_1, meaning they miss out on visual effects such as conservative rasterization, which has the potential to create much more convincing shadows in games once developers start supporting it. Heavy gamers who might be on a bit of a budget might pick up this card as well.
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These games are fast-action titles that require a lot of interaction, but they aren’t the most demanding games in the market. More than 2,100 MOBA tournaments exist, with 20 million-plus viewers alone watching the most recent Dota 2 championship, which had a winner’s prize pool of $18 million. Register now for our GamesBeat 2015 event, October 12-Oct.13, where we’ll explore strategies in the new world of gaming. Nvidia says its ShadowPlay hardware-accelerated encoding tech lets Instant Replay save videos at up to 4K resolution and 60 frames per second with “almost no performance overhead”.
Meet that something: The $160 Nvidia GeForce GTX 950.
The first thing you’ll notice upon peering at the GTX 950 is that it positively dwarfs the GTX 750 Ti.
Here’s hoping that the GTX 950 Ti comes closer to the GTX 960 in performance and the GTX 950 in price, and not the other way around.
This would indeed be quite a sudden arrival, since Nvidia has yet to tell us anything official about the card, nor hype its release at all. The core clock is said to operate at 1,089MHz, but boosted it can reach as high as 1,266MHz.
Although lately the new card has appeared in a series of constant leaks that detail its technological specs, now more concrete info about the GPU used and memory availability have surfaced.
Nvidia recently announced a new feature called GameStream Co-Op for its GeForce Experience software for PC.
An update to GFE will see all MOBA games receive two entries, with the second being a “Optimise for high FPS low latency” option.
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Primarily this lets your friends observe your game, but you can also mirror the controls onto the guest PC to let them take over your gameplay, or even share controls and play cooperatively if the game supports it. The service is now limited to 720p at 60fps, and you need a minimum 6Mbit/s upload speed for smooth gameplay.
