NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 Review With EVGA And ASUS
Test Setup and Unigine Heaven v4.0
How We Configured Our Test Systems: We tested the graphics cards in this article on an EVGA X79 Dark motherboard powered by an Intel Core i7-4960X six-core processor and 16GB of Corsair DDR3-1866 RAM. The first thing we did when configuring the test system was enter the system UEFI and set all values to their "high performance" default settings and disable any integrated peripherals that wouldn't be put to use. The memory's X.M.P. profile was enabled to ensure better-than-stock performance and the solid state drive was then formatted and Windows 8.1 Professional x64 was installed. When the installation was complete, we fully updated the OS and installed the latest DirectX redist along with all of the drivers, games, and benchmark tools necessary to complete our tests.
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Hardware Used: |
Relevant Software: Windows 8.1 Pro x64 DirectX April 2011 Redist AMD Catalyst v14.30.1005B NVIDIA GeForce Drivers v337.50/v347.25 Benchmarks Used: Unigine Heaven v4 3DMark "Fire Strike" Bioshock Infinite Hitman: Absolution Metro Last Light Sleeping Dogs |
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Unigine's Heaven Benchmark v4.0 is built around the Unigine game engine. Unigine is a cross-platform, real-time 3D engine, with support for DirectX 9, DirectX 10, DirectX 11 and OpenGL. The Heaven benchmark--when run in DX11 mode--also makes comprehensive use of tessellation technology and advanced SSAO (screen-space ambient occlusion). It also features volumetric cumulonimbus clouds generated by a physically accurate algorithm and a dynamic sky with light scattering.
Unigine
Heaven
The two GeForce GTX 960 cards we tested from EVGA and Asus were neck-and-neck with the Radeon HD 280X and HD 285 in the Unigine Heaven benchmark. The deltas separating the cards were too small to be meaningful. Time to move on...
