At the GTX 950's heart beats what may be a surprising core design to some. Instead of using a new xx7-series core like the Kepler-based cards did, this one uses a cut down version of the 2.94 billion transistor GM206 found in NVIDIA's GTX 960. To create a ?new? core design all that's been done is the elimination of two Streaming Multiprocessors and voila, a lower priced version is born.

The end result of this cutting is actually a very appealing product for the budget-minded market. The GTX 950 boasts 768 CUDA cores and 48 Texture Units which should be more than adequate for most of today's games, not to mention upcoming DX12 titles. Meanwhile, the back-end setup hasn't been touched so it boasts 32 ROPs and two 64-bit memory controllers feeding into 2GB of GDDR5. Those two aspects are arguably the biggest selling points here when compared against the relatively anemic 16 ROP / 1GB setup of previous generations. Add to that Maxwell's new compression color compression algorithms that significantly optimize memory bus usage and there's potential for some serious improvements.