Off Topic Thread V2.0

Nvidia also have AMD totally walloped in the budget segment, AMD for example have nothing to rival the GTX750 and GTX750Ti at all - excellent performers which critically requires very little power, making it the perfect upgrade for millions of shop-bought PC's that have weaker power supplies.

The GTX950 will probably continue this trend. I don't think it's the higher-end cards the companies have to worry about as much - what percentage of gamers are using cards in the GTX980 class? A very small minority. The real battle would be across the GTX750Ti to the GTX970 class cards.

As someone else said the R9 290 did serious damage to AMD as well, that reference cooler was an abomination. I bought one at launch, and told myself a bit of noise wasn't the end of the world for the stellar performance. I had to sell it on the noise was so bad. If you think people were exaggerating when they said the card sounded like a hairdryer inside your PC when under load, they weren't - it did actually sound like that.

AMD have some good offerings in all brackets apart from the budget segment, but the power consumption issue is a major one. Tell someone that card A and B are broadly similar but card B uses far less power, and it's a no brainer. It's killing AMD. Most of the 'Nvidia killer' cards they release are broadly competitive with their rival product, but do so at enormous power cost.

Nvidia's driver support is also so much better, which is way I personally tend to go Nvidia. This is another very critical point.

What's really keeping them afloat is their focus on areas that neither Intel or Nvidia really excel, but I could see them dropping out of the mainstream gaming market in time to come.

They never recovered against Intel after the Core 2 launch and that was almost 10 years ago now.

A perfect example. GTX950 at $159 is competitive with the $199 380 while using a whopping 90W less power under load.

It also supports SLI which the GTX750Ti didn't (which was disappointing, I always wished I could try!) which would be interesting to see.

From that review above of the Strix 950. Beats the 370 and challenges the 380 frequently in average framerate.

When I started this review, I expected the GeForce GTX 950 to deliver performance closer to Nvidia's GeForce GTX 750 Ti. That board served up excellent frame rates at a good price back when it surfaced. And it was the first Maxwell-based GPU, so I didn't believe big efficiency gains were still possible.

Nvidia has a habit of launching new cards aimed at replacing hardware from two generations prior. They often have similar performance characteristics as the outgoing series with a slightly lower price tag. A great example of this is the GTX 960, which was billed as an upgrade for GeForce GTX 660 owners and enabled similar frame rates as the GTX 760 at a lower price point. So, to say that I was pleasantly surprised by the performance of Asus’ GeForce GTX 950 Strix would be an understatement. In almost all cases, the GTX 950 Strix barely trailed our GeForce GTX 960. After overclocking, it closed the gap even more.

AMD’s competition at this price point, frankly, doesn't keep up. There were no occasions in our testing where the Radeon R7 370 finished ahead of the Asus GTX 950 Strix. Not only that, but Nvidia’s GPU draws less power, too.