NVIDIA's launching the GeForce GTX 960 today

Today, NVIDIA is launching the GeForce GTX 960, which NVIDIA says is the sweet spot in price and performance. They consider the cards in this segment best bang for your buck. The X60 series has been very popular, as evident by Steam’s survey being the #1 GPU class.

So what does GeForce GTX 960 offer? How about 1080P gaming at 60FPS in AAA titles at a very attractive price point. How attractive? Try $199. Yeah, that’s a pretty damn good price for the performance that NVIDIA’s touting.

The specs for the card are as follows, and of course different OEMs may tweak their offering a little compared to the stock specs you see below

The Maxwell chip is awesome as evident by my review of the GeForce GTX 980. Compared to say a GeForce GTX 660, the GeForce GTX 960 gets a 50-60% performance boost but using 20W less. The GeForce GTX 660 ran at 140W TDP while the 960 with 2X performance will be running at 120W TDP. Saving power and giving you more power is one of the strengths of the Maxwell chip.

Speaking of saving power, NVIDIA also talked about reducing power when not needed and even turning off a fan for silent operation in some games such as MOBAs.

It’s also going to be great for overclocking too as NVIDIA has seen a boost of as much as 1500MHz on the base clock. That’s a 25% increase in clock speed, which is pretty amazing.

Various vendors will have cards out today and at $199 for some cards that will be overclocked, that’s a hell of a deal. The GeForce GTX 960 is DirectX 12 ready so it’s got some future proofing there and you’ll be playing many AAA games at 1080P at 60FPS.  You’ll also get some great features from GeForce Experience such as ShadowPlay and GameStream. All told, this should be a big seller for NVIDIA and a card that really appeals to many consumers’ wallets looking to upgrade their rig.