When comparing NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080, the Slant community recommends NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 for most people. In the question“What are the best GPUs for gaming?” NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 is ranked 5th while NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 is ranked 14th. The most important reason people chose NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 is:
In benchmarks, the GTX 1080 FE (Founder's Edition) is a hair slower than *two* GTX 980 units in SLI configuration (the difference is 2% in 3DMark 11). In gaming tests, the GTX 1080 FE achieved 61fps average in Need For Speed 2016 on high settings at 4K resolution. For comparison, the AMD Radeon R9 Fury scored 40fps (34% lower), and the GTX 980 scored 34fps (44% lower than the GTX 1080 FE). The only slowdowns you will encounter in maxed out 4K graphics is during extremely demanding scenes. The GTX 1080 FE also supports GPU Boost 3.0 which lets it ramp up performance even higher as long as the temperature doesn't rise too much.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Excellent overclocking potential
Overclocking allows you to increase the clock speeds of your GPU for increased performance. The GTX 960 chip overclocks very well and overclock results of over 15% aren't uncommon. In this case, both the GPU base clock and memory have been overlocked 18%, which also results in a 18.3% better performance in Battlefield 3 (73.9 FPS vs 87.4 FPS).
Pro Ideal for 1080p gaming
The GTX 960 holds up well in gaming benchmarks with a 1080p resolution and all games are perfectly playable. Some of the more recent titles may require you to to use medium settings, but overall 1080p performance is great. For example, Metro Last Light runs at an average of 56.1 frames per second with maximum details. Average FPS in Alien Isolation is 89.5 FPS in 1080p, and it also performs well in 1440p with an average 56.7 frames per second. Similar results can be seen in Bioshock Infinite with 90 average FPS in 1080p and 54.1 FPS in 1440p. In Battlefield 4, a result of 48.8 FPS is reached in 1080p with 4x AA enabled.
Pro Low power consumption
The GeForce GTX 960 requires a single 6-pin PCIe power connector and is decently energy efficient. In non-gaming situations, maximum consumption for an entire system is measured at about 9 watts while the maximum power usage during full load is 140 watts. For comparison, the GTX 760 consumes 167 watts during full load - 21% more.
Pro Epic 4K performance
In benchmarks, the GTX 1080 FE (Founder's Edition) is a hair slower than two GTX 980 units in SLI configuration (the difference is 2% in 3DMark 11).
In gaming tests, the GTX 1080 FE achieved 61fps average in Need For Speed 2016 on high settings at 4K resolution. For comparison, the AMD Radeon R9 Fury scored 40fps (34% lower), and the GTX 980 scored 34fps (44% lower than the GTX 1080 FE).
The only slowdowns you will encounter in maxed out 4K graphics is during extremely demanding scenes.
The GTX 1080 FE also supports GPU Boost 3.0 which lets it ramp up performance even higher as long as the temperature doesn't rise too much.
Pro Well optimized
NVIDIA properly optimized the GTX 1080 FE for DirectX. This means that games supporting DirectX 11 will see a slight performance boost, but more-so for the upcoming games using DirectX12.
Pro Very power efficient
While performance is higher than its competitors, the GTX 1080 FE actually uses less power. The maximum amount of power consumption this GPU requires is around 185 watts, which is an improvement of over 35% compared to NVIDIA's previous generation high-end graphics card, the GTX 980 Ti. This also plays a positive role when choosing a power supply, or determining if you need to upgrade your existing PSU.
Cons
Con Is outperformed by the RX 470
Although NVIDIA has announced the succesor of the GTX 960 in the form of the more powerful GTX 1060, the price point of the older 960 remains over a hundred dollars lower. This puts the GTX 960 in direct competition with AMD's new RX 470 graphics card which is available for a slightly higher price but offers consistently better performance.
Con Previous generation chip
The GTX 960 chip has been around for a while, and both NVIDIA and AMD are introducing new mid-range graphics cards in the remainder of 2016. It's only a matter of time before a new graphics card debuts with increased performance and the same price tag, such as the RX 480 by AMD.
Con No native support for 3- and 4-way SLI
SLI - short for Scalable Link Interface - is NVIDIA's technology of combining the power of two or more identical GPU's in order to reach a better performance. In other words, you can use multiple GTX 1080 video cards to further increase performance. Although the GTX 1080 supports 2-way SLI without a problem, NVIDIA does not offer support for 3- and 4-way SLI. The included SLI-bridge which serves as a connector between the two cards, is only compatible in a 2-way configuration. 3-way and 4-way SLI are possible but aren't supported. You'll have to use an older SLI-bridge found on older GeForce models and you'll need to generate an 'Enthusiast Key' on NVIDIA's website. However, NVIDIA does not guarantee a 3- or 4-way configuration will provide any noticeable benefits.
Con Disappointing performance improvements when using Vulkan
Vulkan is a graphical API that allows developers to communicate better with the GPU, which in theory should result in performance improvements compared to the more standard DirectX 12 or OpenGL API's. The GTX 1080 doesn't perform particularly better in Vulkan however, and the difference with the standard OpenGL is minimal at higher resolutions.
Doom is one of the first (and only) titles with support for Vulkan and serves as a good benchmark for OpenGL vs Vulkan performance. In 1080p Full HD resolution and Ultra settings, the GTX 1080 is able to reach an average framerate of 140 FPS in OpenGL. Vulkan improves the frame rate to 166 FPS, a fifteen percent increase. Starting from 1440p resolutions however, performance improvements using Vulkan are very minimal and not noticeable during gameplay. 1080 does pretty well at 109 FPS in 1440p, while Vulkan only marginally improves this result with 145 FPS, a 5% increase. For comparison: AMD's RX 480 card does perform significantly better with Vulkan and higher frame rates, with a performance boost of 29.3%. Similar results are seen when testing in 4K. In this case, the GTX 1080 using Vulkan actually performs worse than the standard OpenGL, with 59 FPS and 60 FPS respectively. AMD's RX 480 is better optimized, as it's able to achieve a performance increase of 24.7% in this scenario.
In short, Vulkan performance seems particularly useful when gaming in Full HD, but it doesn't provide much performance benefits otherwise. It would appear that NVIDIA's Pascal architecture isn't optimized for high-resolution Vulkan gaming.