The battle for prominence in this generation of graphics cards from both of the big manufacturers has been an interesting one. While Nvidia has retained the performance crown, AMD certainly stole the show with its very different take on a contemporary graphics card, the liquid-cooled Fury X. However, while hearts and minds might be won with high-end hardware, the mid-range and economy class cards are the real money makers, so Nvidia's GTX 950 is one of its most important releases this year.
Although we don't have anything in the way of official specifications, we do have some rumored ones that are said to have leaked . It is said to be based on the same GM206 silicon as the GTX 960, but will come with a quarter less CUDA cores enabled, which work out to 768.
Clock speeds are expected to be somewhere between 1,150 and 1,250 MHz on the core, boosted to somewhere between 1,350 and 1,450MHz. Memory wise it's expected there will be just 2GB of GDDR5 running through a 128-bit bus. To power this users will require just one eight-pin PCIe power cable and must factor in around a 90 watts power draw at load.
In terms of its rear port connectors, it's slated to come with dual link DVI, a single HDMI 2.0 port and at least one DisplayPort 1.2 connector, though there may be more. Third-party vendors tend to customize port selection, as well, so you'll likely be able to find a GTX 95o with whatever combination you desire.
All of this is designed to give Nvidia a viable replacement for its popular GTX 750 and a decent competitor for AMD's R7 370, which is actually a rebrand of AMD's previous R9 270 GPU released towards the tail end of 2013.
As much as these specifications should all be taken with a pinch of salt, we won't have long to wait to find out for sure what the GTX 950 is all about, as it is expected to launch on August 17.
Get a daily look at what’s developing in science and technology throughout the world.