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The Palit GTX 950 2GB StormX Dual graphics card is a cost-effective implementation of the GTX 950 GPU. The card features a modest factory overclock but sports a dual-fan cooler to provide quiet operation. Add the light-blue colour into the mix, and Palit's styling may be a reason for some potential buyers to put it on their wishlist.
Performance from the card in its out-of-the-box state is good. A comfortable performance gap is opened up between a factory overclocked GTX 750 Ti and Palit's modestly-overclocked GTX 950. Asus' STRIX GTX 950 card is a little faster at the factory-overclocked frequency, although that solution is also more expensive than Palit's offering.
Overclocking performance from Palit's board was good. We saw the core clock climb as high as 1474MHz during gaming and memory reached 7800MHz effective with relative ease. These frequency boosts opened up a good serving of performance which closed the performance gap to Asus' manually-overclocked solution that was able to achieve a slightly higher core clock.
Acoustic performance from the Palit cooler was great. The 0dB mode worked well and even under load the fans were barely audible. Thermal performance is not as strong as we would have liked though, with the GPU creeping over 70°C at factory clocks and almost hitting 80°C when manually overclocked.
The fan speed never rose above 56%, so there is clearly more cooling potential from Palit's card if you are happy with slightly higher noise output and manual fan speed tuning.
Another negative for gamers who value system appearance is the brown PCB. While this may be a minor point, it may be enough to dissuade some potential customers who want an aesthetically-friendly gaming machine.
We have focussed on the GTX 950 GPU in our review of Asus' STRIX Gaming GTX 950 DirectCU II OC graphics card. The latest addition to the Maxwell family brings heavy competition to the £129 MSRP price point where AMD has been commanding. Nvidia's GPU brings with it many of the Maxwell core's goodies, such as HDMI 2.0, strong overclocking potential, and low power usage.
I expect Palit's GTX 950 StormX Dual to be positioned between the lower- and mid-end of the GTX 950 pricing spectrum. The card is currently available to pre-order for around £135, which puts it around £15 cheaper than Asus' STRIX GTX 950 DC2 OC card. That slight cost saving can be invested elsewhere by a budget-conscious gamer. And with some time spent manually adjusting clock speeds, the performance of Maxwell's GM206 core can be further unlocked by Palit's board.
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Pros:
- Positive overclocking performance.
- Handles 1920×1080 high/ultra IQ gaming very well.
- Low noise output from the dual-fan cooler.
- Blue colour may appeal to some gamers seeking a change from red.
- Good power consumption numbers.
- Factory overclocked, albeit quite modestly.
Cons:
- Brown PCB.
- Asus DirectCU II cooler is better with out-of-the-box operation.
- 2GB VRAM of the GTX 950 is cutting it fine for many AAA games.
KitGuru says: A smart, cost-effective offering from Palit that has the potential to unlock much of the GTX 950 GPU's overclocking performance.
Ok people what think about this great great explanation about why AMD should be better than NVIDIA over DirectX12 for have best supports the Shaders asynchronouscheck this is not my argument but It seems well argued.
first the souce:http://www.overclock.net/t/1569897/various-ashes-of-the-singularity-dx12-benchmarks/400#post_24321843
Well I figured I’d create an account in order to explain away what you’re all seeing in the Ashes of the Singularity DX12 Benchmarks. I won’t divulge too much of my background information but suffice to say
that I’m an old veteran who used to go by the handle ElMoIsEviL.
First off nVidia is posting their true DirectX12 performance figures in these tests. Ashes of the Singularity is all about Parallelism and that’s an area, that although Maxwell 2 does better than previous nVIDIA architectures, it is still inferior in this department when compared to the likes of AMDs GCN 1.1/1.2 architectures. Here’s why…
Maxwell’s Asychronous Thread Warp can queue up 31 Compute tasks and 1 Graphic task. Now compare this with AMD GCN 1.1/1.2 which is composed of 8 Asynchronous Compute Engines each able to queue 8 Compute tasks for a total of 64 coupled with 1 Graphic task by the Graphic Command Processor. See bellow:
http://cdn.overclock.net/4/48/900x900px-LL-489247b8_Async_Aces_575px.png
Each ACE can also apply certain Post Processing Effects without incurring much of a performance penalty. This feature is heavily used for Lighting in Ashes of the Singularity. Think of all of the simultaneous light sources firing off as each unit in the game fires a shot or the various explosions which ensue as examples.
http://cdn.overclock.net/8/89/900x900px-LL-89354727_asynchronous-performance-liquid-vr.jpeg
This means that AMDs GCN 1.1/1.2 is best adapted at handling the increase in Draw Calls now being made by the Multi-Core CPU under Direct X 12.
Therefore in game titles which rely heavily on Parallelism, likely most DirectX 12 titles, AMD GCN 1.1/1.2 should do very well provided they do not hit a Geometry or Rasterizer Operator bottleneck before nVIDIA hits
their Draw Call/Parallelism bottleneck. The picture bellow highlights the Draw Call/Parallelism superioty of GCN 1.1/1.2 over Maxwell 2:
http://cdn.overclock.net/7/7d/900x900px-LL-7d8a8295_drawcalls.jpeg
A more efficient queueing of workloads, through better thread Parallelism, also enables the R9 290x to come closer to its theoretical Compute figures which just happen to be ever so shy from those of the GTX 980 Ti (5.8 TFlops vs 6.1 TFlops respectively) as seen bellow:
http://cdn.overclock.net/9/92/900x900px-LL-92367ca0_Compute_01b.jpeg
What you will notice is that Ashes of the Singularity is also quite hard on the Rasterizer Operators highlighting a rather peculiar behavior. That behavior is that an R9 290x, with its 64 Rops, ends up performing near the same as a Fury-X, also with 64 Rops. A great way of picturing this in action is from the Graph bellow (courtesy of Beyond3D):
http://cdn.overclock.net/b/bd/900x900px-LL-bd73e764_Compute_02b.jpeg
As for the folks claiming a conspiracy theory, not in the least. The reason AMDs DX11 performance is so poor under Ashes of the Singularity is because AMD literally did zero optimizations for the path. AMD is
clearly looking on selling Asynchronous Shading as a feature to developers because their architecture is well suited for the task. It doesn’t hurt that it also costs less in terms of Research and Development of drivers. Asynchronous Shading allows GCN to hit near full efficiency without even requiring any driver work whatsoever.
nVIDIA, on the other hand, does much better at Serial scheduling of work loads (when you consider that anything prior to Maxwell 2 is limited to Serial Scheduling rather than Parallel Scheduling). DirectX 11 is
suited for Serial Scheduling therefore naturally nVIDIA has an advantage under DirectX 11. In this graph, provided by Anandtech, you have the correct figures for nVIDIAs architectures (from Kepler to Maxwell 2)
though the figures for GCN are incorrect (they did not multiply the number of Asynchronous Compute Engines by 8):
http://www.overclock.net/content/type/61/id/2558710/width/350/height/700/flags/LL
People wondering why Nvidia is doing a bit better in DX11 than DX12. That’s because Nvidia optimized their DX11 path in their drivers for Ashes of the Singularity. With DX12 there are no tangible driver optimizations because the Game Engine speaks almost directly to the Graphics Hardware. So none were made. Nvidia is at the mercy of the programmers talents as well as their own Maxwell architectures thread parallelism performance under DX12. The Devellopers programmed for thread parallelism in Ashes of the Singularity in order to be able to better draw all those objects on the screen. Therefore what were seeing with the Nvidia numbers is the Nvidia draw call bottleneck showing up under DX12. Nvidia works around this with its own optimizations in DX11 by prioritizing workloads and replacing shaders. Yes, the nVIDIA driver contains a compiler which re-compiles and replaces shaders which are not fine tuned to their architecture on a per game basis. NVidia’s driver is also Multi-Threaded, making use of the idling CPU cores in order to recompile/replace shaders. The work nVIDIA does in software, under DX11, is the work AMD do in Hardware, under DX12, with their Asynchronous Compute Engines.
But what about poor AMD DX11 performance? Simple. AMDs GCN 1.1/1.2 architecture is suited towards Parallelism. It requires the CPU to feed the graphics card work. This creates a CPU bottleneck, on AMD hardware, under DX11 and low resolutions (say 1080p and even 1600p for Fury-X), as DX11 is limited to 1-2 cores for the Graphics pipeline (which also needs to take care of AI, Physics etc). Replacing shaders or
re-compiling shaders is not a solution for GCN 1.1/1.2 because AMDs Asynchronous Compute Engines are built to break down complex workloads into smaller, easier to work, workloads. The only way around this issue, if you want to maximize the use of all available compute resources under GCN 1.1/1.2, is to feed the GPU in Parallel… in comes in Mantle, Vulcan and Direct X 12.
People wondering why Fury-X did so poorly in 1080p under DirectX 11 titles? That’s your answer.
A video which talks about Ashes of the Singularity in depth:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9UACXikdR0
PS. Don’t count on better Direct X 12 drivers from nVIDIA. DirectX 12 is closer to Metal and it’s all on the developer to make efficient use of both nVIDIA and AMDs architectures…
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