As we work through NVIDIA's Maxwell-based product stack, we eventually get to what is considered the gaming sweet spot or the best price/performance leader in the product stack. We saw this scenario play out with the GTX 460/560/660/760, and now the GTX 960 that launches today. The added feature set included on the GTX 980 and GTX 970 were not yet introduced on the GTX 750 Ti and GTX 750, NVIDIA's earliest Maxwell-based cards, is finally available in the most popular price/performance point. The GTX 960 brings DirectX 12, MFAA (Multi Frame Sampled AA), DSR (Dynamic Super Resolution), and VXGI (Voxel Global Illumination) support to the market for the majority of the gaming crowd. All features the upper end of the product stack has enjoyed for a few months now.

Today NVIDIA is releasing the GTX 960 and usually we see reference samples, but for this go around the majority of the board partners will have non-reference designs ready to buy starting today. With that being said I will be looking at a pair of well clocked samples from EVGA and MSI that have sent us their own interpretations of what a GTX 960 should be. I will be looking at the GTX 960 SSC ACX 2.0+ from EVGA and the GTX 960 Gaming 2G from MSI. These cards will sit price wise about $10 more than the reference card's $199 price point at launch, so you have just a small premium for a lot of feature set. Let's take a look at some of the additional features NVIDIA brings to the table, then a trip through the cards before I put them through their paces.