In-Game Benchmarks
So the synthetic benchmarks help pinpoint a possible issue where at higher resolutions the GTX 950 falls a little behind. Now it is time to see how well it performs in the real world in real games. To do that I tested using nine different modern games using a variety of game types and game engines. I did the testing at both 1080p and again at 1440p. The GTX 950 isn’t designed to perform at 1440p but I was still curious if it would play any of our games at their highest settings at that resolution. To help make things simpler with all of our video card reviews I like to break things down into three categories by their resolution. The first is under 30 FPS or what I consider to be unplayable, second is over 30 FPS and under 60 FPS aka playable but not perfect, and lastly everything over 60 FPS the ideal frame rate. To help I have actually put the results into two graphs, one for 1080p and the other 1440p.
So what are the end results? Well the short version is about what was expected, the GTX 950 Strix crushes 1080p but struggles with 1440p. At 1080p there is a good list of games that can be played with the settings cranked without any changes but the rest will take a few small changes to get up over the 60 FPS sweet spot if you prefer that. At 1440p I was surprised anything was playable, but three games were. That does leave a lot of games in the unplayable list but why are you trying to push 1440p with a card that costs half what your monitor does anyhow! Of course even with the new graphs I still wanted to include the full results as well, as a whole the 950 Strix out performed the 370 at 1080p consistently but at 1440p sometimes the 370 edged it out.