Reviews for NVIDIA’s budget-friendly GTX 950 card are coming in

High-end video cards like Nvidia’s GTX 980 Ti and AMD’s Radeon Fury X are what many gamers aspire to, but the fact they’re aspirational means they’re not what most gamers actually purchase. Spending several hundred dollars (or more) on a video card is never easy to justify. Humble but capable budget cards represent what the bulk of gamers actually use. Nvidia has a long history of producing excellent cards for around $200 that can be traced back to the 8800 GT, an affordable choice that was able to play many games of the era at 2,560 x 1,600 resolution (back then, 16:9 was not the go-to form factor). Yet the company has arguably struggled when forced to limbo its price lower. Its current entry-level card, the GTX 750 Ti, is now over a year old, and there’s a big hole in the company’s line-up between it and the $200 GTX 960. The GTX 950 fills that hole. With prices starting at $160, the card is Nvidia’s response to AMD’s recently released R7 370, a card that typically sells at an identical price. Unlike AMD, which re-brands and slashes the price of older GPUs to create budget offerings, Nvidia is using its latest architecture, known as Maxwell, to back the 950. Let’s see which strategy works best.