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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960A

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960A: Budget GPU for Modern Tasks

April 2025

Introduction

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960A is an updated version of the legendary GTX 960, adapted to meet the demands of 2025. This graphics card is positioned as an affordable solution for gamers and users who need stable performance without extravagance. In this article, we will explore what sets the GTX 960A apart, who it is suitable for, and what compromises to expect.

1. Architecture and Key Features

Architecture: The GTX 960A is based on an upgraded version of the NVIDIA Turing architecture (not to be confused with the RTX series). This allows for improved energy efficiency compared to the original Maxwell, but it lacks support for ray tracing (RTX) and DLSS.

Manufacturing Technology: The card is manufactured using Samsung's 8nm process, which reduces heat output and production costs.

Unique Features:

- Adaptive Shading: Optimizes the load on shader blocks to increase FPS in dynamic scenes.

- NVENC: Hardware video encoding for streamers (up to 4K 60 FPS in OBS).

- Support for DirectX 12 Ultimate: Partial implementation of features, but without hardware acceleration for RT cores.

Lack of RTX Technologies: The GTX 960A does not support ray tracing or DLSS, limiting its capabilities in modern AAA games with RT effects.

2. Memory

- Memory Type: GDDR6 (compared to GDDR5 in the original GTX 960).

- Capacity: 6 GB — a comfortable minimum for 2025 gaming at medium settings.

- Bus and Bandwidth: A 192-bit bus provides 336 GB/s (compared to 112 GB/s in the GTX 960). This reduces the "bottleneck" at resolutions above 1080p.

Impact on Performance:

- In games with high VRAM consumption (e.g., Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty), 6 GB will suffice for medium-quality textures.

- For 4K video editing in DaVinci Resolve, memory capacity is critical — rendering complex projects is possible, but with caveats.

3. Gaming Performance

1080p Resolution (Medium/High Settings):

- Fortnite: 90-110 FPS (without DLSS).

- Apex Legends: 75-90 FPS.

- Elden Ring: 50-60 FPS (medium settings).

1440p: Settings need to be lowered. For example, Call of Duty: Warzone 3 delivers 45-55 FPS.

4K: Not recommended — Assassin’s Creed Nexus barely reaches 25 FPS on low settings.

Ray Tracing: Not supported. When enabling software emulation (e.g., through Proton), FPS drops by 2-3 times.

4. Professional Tasks

- Video Editing: Thanks to NVENC and 6 GB of VRAM, the card can handle 4K video rendering in Premiere Pro, but processing time is 20-30% higher than that of the RTX 3050.

- 3D Modeling: In Blender and Maya, CUDA cores provide basic performance, but the lack of RT accelerators slows down rendering of complex scenes.

- Scientific Calculations: Support for OpenCL 3.0 and CUDA 8.0 makes the GTX 960A suitable for introductory machine learning tasks, but for serious applications, it’s better to choose an RTX with Tensor Cores.

5. Power Consumption and Heat Output

- TDP: 95 W — 25% more efficient than the original GTX 960.

- Cooling: The reference model uses a dual-fan system. Temperature under load ranges from 68 to 72°C.

- Case Recommendations: A case with 2-3 fans is sufficient. For compact builds, models up to 220 mm in length are suitable.

6. Comparison with Competitors

AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT (4 GB GDDR6):

- Pros: Support for FSR 3.0, slightly higher FPS in Vulkan games.

- Cons: Only 4 GB of memory, poor support for professional software.

Intel Arc A580 (8 GB GDDR6):

- Pros: More memory, better performance with DX12.

- Cons: Higher power consumption (130 W), driver issues on Linux.

Conclusion: The GTX 960A wins on the basis of stability and CUDA support, but falls short in "heavy" scenarios.

7. Practical Tips

- Power Supply: A 450 W unit is sufficient (e.g., Corsair CX450).

- Compatibility: PCIe 4.0 x8 — works on older platforms (PCIe 3.0) with up to a 5% performance loss.

- Drivers: Regularly update GeForce Experience. For Linux, the proprietary driver version 550+ is recommended.

Important: The card does not require additional power — sufficient power is drawn from the PCIe slot.

8. Pros and Cons

Pros:

- Low price: $199 for a new model.

- Energy efficiency.

- Support for modern APIs (DX12 Ultimate, Vulkan 1.3).

Cons:

- No hardware Ray Tracing or DLSS.

- Only 6 GB of memory — a limitation for future games.

- Weak overclocking potential.

9. Final Conclusion: Who is the GTX 960A For?

This graphics card is suited for those seeking a balance between price and performance:

- Gamers playing titles like Apex Legends or Fortnite at 1080p.

- Streamers who value stability and NVENC.

- Beginner editors and 3D designers on a budget.

However, if you plan to dive into ray tracing or work with 8K content, the GTX 960A will feel lacking. In 2025, this is an optimal option for those not ready to pay a premium for future technologies but who want to work and play comfortably today.

Basic

Label Name

NVIDIA

Platform

Mobile

Launch Date

March 2015

Model Name

GeForce GTX 960A

Generation

GeForce 900A

Base Clock

1029MHz

Boost Clock

1085MHz

Bus Interface

MXM-B (3.0)

Transistors

1,870 million

TMUs

Texture Mapping Units (TMUs) serve as components of the GPU, which are capable of rotating, scaling, and distorting binary images, and then placing them as textures onto any plane of a given 3D model. This process is called texture mapping.

Foundry

TSMC

Process Size

28 nm

Architecture

Maxwell

Memory Specifications

Memory Size

2GB

Memory Type

GDDR5

Memory Bus

The memory bus width refers to the number of bits of data that the video memory can transfer within a single clock cycle. The larger the bus width, the greater the amount of data that can be transmitted instantaneously, making it one of the crucial parameters of video memory. The memory bandwidth is calculated as: Memory Bandwidth = Memory Frequency x Memory Bus Width / 8. Therefore, when the memory frequencies are similar, the memory bus width will determine the size of the memory bandwidth.

128bit

Memory Clock

1253MHz

Bandwidth

Memory bandwidth refers to the data transfer rate between the graphics chip and the video memory. It is measured in bytes per second, and the formula to calculate it is: memory bandwidth = working frequency × memory bus width / 8 bits.

80.19 GB/s

Theoretical Performance

Pixel Rate

Pixel fill rate refers to the number of pixels a graphics processing unit (GPU) can render per second, measured in MPixels/s (million pixels per second) or GPixels/s (billion pixels per second). It is the most commonly used metric to evaluate the pixel processing performance of a graphics card.

17.36 GPixel/s

Texture Rate

Texture fill rate refers to the number of texture map elements (texels) that a GPU can map to pixels in a single second.

43.40 GTexel/s

FP64 (double)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy, while single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

43.40 GFLOPS

FP32 (float)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks, while double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

1.361 TFLOPS

Miscellaneous

Shading Units

The most fundamental processing unit is the Streaming Processor (SP), where specific instructions and tasks are executed. GPUs perform parallel computing, which means multiple SPs work simultaneously to process tasks.

640

L1 Cache

64 KB (per SMM)

L2 Cache

2MB

TDP

75W

Vulkan Version

Vulkan is a cross-platform graphics and compute API by Khronos Group, offering high performance and low CPU overhead. It lets developers control the GPU directly, reduces rendering overhead, and supports multi-threading and multi-core processors.

1.3

OpenCL Version

3.0

OpenGL

4.6

DirectX

12 (11_0)

CUDA

5.0

Shader Model

5.1

ROPs

The Raster Operations Pipeline (ROPs) is primarily responsible for handling lighting and reflection calculations in games, as well as managing effects like anti-aliasing (AA), high resolution, smoke, and fire. The more demanding the anti-aliasing and lighting effects in a game, the higher the performance requirements for the ROPs; otherwise, it may result in a sharp drop in frame rate.

Benchmarks

FP32 (float)

Score

1.361 TFLOPS

OpenCL

Score

11820

Compared to Other GPU

FP32 (float) / TFLOPS

GeForce GTX 860M

1.417 +4.1%

Radeon HD 6770

1.387 +1.9%

GeForce GTX 960A

1.361

Radeon HD 4890

1.333 -2.1%

UHD Graphics 64EU Mobile

1.306 -4%

OpenCL

Radeon RX 6700S

62821 +431.5%

Radeon Pro 5300

38843 +228.6%

Radeon R9 M290X

21442 +81.4%

GeForce GTX 960A

11820

Radeon HD 5750

884 -92.5%