Today, NVIDIA and its partners are delivering the next installment in the Maxwell plan for world domination, the GTX 950. Having seen Maxwell grow up from the earliest example, the GTX 750 and 750 Ti, to and through GTX Titan X, we now go back to the beginning to take all the innovation and work on the hardware back to the entry level price points. Starting at an opening price of $159, NVIDIA is not only beefing up the hardware, but thoroughly developing its ecosystem based around three key principles: to provide the best hardware, the best experience, and to give the gamer more platforms to enjoy the gaming experience.

NVIDIA has had the hardware for a while, but have really ratcheted up the ecosystem side of the equation over the past couple years through its GameWorks initiatives. It does this by getting in on the ground floor and offering up a whole platform of technology, like VisualFX (HBAO+, FaceWorks, HairWorks, WaveWorks, GI Works, etc.), PhysX, FleX,OptiX, a core SDK with sample code, debuggers, and profilers. It enables those game developers to input realistic shadows, smoke, fur, clothing, destruction, various fluid effects, and global illumination. Add in the latest DX12 feature sets and you end up with a much improved gaming experience.

Today, I will be taking a look at a trio of these entry level gaming solutions based on NVIDIA's 28nm GM 206 core. I have the ASUS GTX 950 Strix, the EVGA GTX 950 SSC, and the MSI GTX 950 Gaming 2G, all of which start with the same core and 2GB of GDDR5 memory, but take different paths to get to the finished product. It should prove interesting to see how this trio performs against not only the GTX 750, but how well it fares against the competition from AMD.