NVIDIA's Kepler architecture has been around for some time now. While it may be hard to believe, we were introduced to Kepler in GTX 680 guise back in March of 2012 which means it's nearly two years old now. There have been some revisions since then, allowing the architecture to deliver better performance per watt and better compete against AMD's alternatives. Now the time has come to unveil their next generation DX11 architecture, code named Maxwell.

Unlike previous launches, Maxwell isn't being rolled out into the high end market but will initially target volume sales within the $99 to $149 price points via a new 1.87 billion transistor GM107 core. This focus on budget minded gamers may sound like an odd decision on NVIDIA's part but they feel the current flagship GeForce parts compete well against AMD's product stack (and they do) so there's more than enough time to fine-tune Maxwell for other applications. Make no mistake about it though, GM107 is simply a pipe-cleaner part that is meant to test a new architecture and prepare the way for higher end products in the near future.

Contrary to AMD's scattershot approach by flooding the mid-range with a deluge of different, closely priced cards like the R7 260X, R7 265 and R9 270, NVIDIA is taking a more measured approach. The GM107 will be first rolled into two different SKUs: the GTX 750 Ti and GTX 750.