Synthetic Benchmarks

As always I started of my testing of the two GTX 950’s by running through our synthetic benchmarks. Here I’m able to get a good idea of the overall performance of a card or in this case cards to be able to compare against other cards with less variances like the in game benchmarks tend to have. I ran through all three of the 3DMark Fire Strike benchmarks. These benchmarks are a good representation of 1080p gaming (performance), 1440p gaming (extreme), and 4k gaming (ultra). At the performance setting the 950’s in SLI pulled an impressive 12149 score for an improvement of 84% over a single GTX 950. This was much higher than the 10137 that the two R7 370’s got in the same test and it put the 950’s up just under the GTX 980 and about on par with an overclocked R9 390. The extreme benchmark result showed similar results falling once again in between the 980 and the 390. It was the ultra benchmark results that  was especially curious about. During the ingle card testing this same benchmark gave us a peak at the memory limitations of the 950. The same issue came up when in SLI as well. In fact due to the slight efficiency loss of SLI the results were actually lower than the single card results. Its clear the memory issue is still a big limitation when trying to run extremely high resolution stuff, we will have to see if it holds back the 1440p testing later. 

The Heaven Benchmark 4.0 results weren’t held back at all though with an average FPS of 72.5, the same as the GTX 780 Ti. Considering the Crossfire issues that the 370’s ran into here I was happy to see that the GTX 950’s didn’t have SLI issues. This of course puts the results in a completely different class, well over double of the 370 crossfire results. In the Valley benchmark the R9 390’s did edge out a little performance on the 950’s and the 370’s in Crossfire were a little closer than in the previous tests but still about 6 FPS behind.