Earlier this month, the wonderful people over at Nvidia invited us here at GamersPack to come check out their upcoming lineup of GTX 950 graphics cards and the incredible Geforce Experience.
Although an unmistakable leap forward in visual quality for PC gaming, the GTX 950 is deceptively familiar at a glance. Sitting comfortably in a main menu for Dota 2, the 950’s performance looked almost identical to the 650’s. Until the new replay feature was initiated.
To demonstrate the stability of the 950, Nvidia used the replay feature of the Geforce Experience to play a pre-recorded game of Dota. The technology’s hidden secret is that in order to save memory, only mouse clicks, keyboard inputs and character loads are actually recorded. The software then uses the computer’s hardware to create the map and character layouts, and lets the action take place exactly the way it did when the game was recorded. As an added bonus, viewers can now move their camera anywhere in the map, while paying attention to any player they want.
We were then shown two monitors that sat comfortably at their optimized graphic settings and their highest frame rate – the 650 at 60fps and the 950 at 100fps. When the pre-recorded replay started, the GTX 650 immediately began to stutter, dropping to as low as 30fps when the game’s action started to heat up. The GTX 950, however, stayed perfectly comfortable at a full 100fps and refused to even second guess itself as the characters ran frantically around the map. There was an incident when action got really intense and filled the screen, and it was then when the 950 lost only a single frame before instantly resuming at 100 fps.
In addition to split-second load times, optimized graphic output and wonderful shading effects, there’s the feature that gamers will ultimately find themselves in need off – latency. Anyone who has ever played a computer game online, let alone a MOBA, understands that the fractions of a second that it takes the computer to register a mouse click can mean the difference between winning and losing. The video above is a slow motion rendering of what mouse latency looks like, and how with the GTX 950, Nvidia was able to reduce by half the previous threshold that they themselves had set.
Nvidia’s long history of building graphics cards have resulted in a core knowledge that led to the creation of the GTX 950. However, Nvidia also understands that gamers who use their products may not fully realize how to take advantage of the power they’ve been given, which is where their new Geforce Experience software comes in handy.
The software is able to perform a full scan of your entire computer. It will identify every game that is installed and locate them within the software so they can be easily accessed. Then, the software will identify every digital component within your computer and optimize each individual game’s audio/visual settings to perfectly create a stable gaming experience that your computer and your Nvidia graphics card are capable of.
Streaming your gameplay has never been easier thanks to the Geforce Experience’s in-game overlay, which can broadcast directly to streaming sites. But indeed, the magic of this new software lies within its share capabilities. Not only can you stream your games live at full 1080p, but you can actually record the gameplay at the same time. After choosing a start and stop point, users can then upload clips directly to their YouTube accounts.
With the strangely unheard of feature known as Gamestream Co-op, Gamers looking for easier ways to connect with friends will soon be able to invite people to play alongside them, even if they don’t own the game. Players who have the Geforce Experience installed on their computers can now stream their game to another friend’s PC. The computer on which that game is installed will physically render the actual gameplay, while a P2P connection allows it to be streamed directly to the other PC with absolutely no input delay. Since the client PC doesn’t have to worry about running the game, it sends to the host only the control inputs, saving plenty of bandwidth for live-streaming the game for the whole world to see.
The Geforce Experience is a revolution in the PC gaming ecosystem, with an open beta coming later this September. Even though it may not require you have a top of the line Nvidia graphics card, or even Nvidia products in order to run your favorite games at peak performance, you are doing yourself a huge disservice by not upgrading your PC.
Speaking of which, Nvidia’s new line up of GTX graphics cards are available now at discount prices. The  GTX 950 costs $159.99, $199.99 for the GTX 960, $329.99 for the GTX 970, $499.99 for the GTX 980, $649.99 for the GTX 980Ti and $999 for the Titan X.
