The new mainstream champ is here? You see, there's the $199 (£150) GTX 960 GPU that, Nvidia says, is the killer card for full-on eye candy at the ubiquitous 1080p resolution. Those without that kind of budget need to look a step further down the line and there you will find the GTX 750 Ti that's based on first-generation Maxwell architecture and costs $129 (£100) or so. The yawning gap is obvious and painful for Nvidia because it's an area that rival AMD has exploited with a succession of reimagined GPUs.

Nvidia needs another GeForce to tempt those gamers with a $150-$170 budget, but constructing such a fit-for-purpose GPU isn't easy. The erstwhile mainstream champ, GTX 750 Ti, packs in the full complement of cores and shaders into the GM107 die so there's no scope there. Redesigning the second-generation Maxwell die for a particular price point is irksome, so Nvidia opts for the lesser of two evils by castrating a GPU already available to the masses.