MOBA Gaming Performance – Is The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950 Worth It?

By David Yee

League of Legends

LCS Season 3 WorldsLeague of Legends is a 2009 multiplayer online battle arena game developed by Riot Games. Among all MOBA game titles, this one is the most popular. The game is heavily inspired by Defense of the Ancients and as such features the same overarching game design and primary objective. League of Legends is free-to-play with grindwall elements restricting champion character choice and rune customization to newer players. The game engine was developed by Riot Games and its relative simplicity and age make it very undemanding on computer hardware.League of Legends SettingsLeague of Legends does not officially have a replay feature though several third-party developers have created replay solutions that typically take advantage of the game’s in-game spectator feature. We used Replay.gg which is not only convenient, but doesn’t require software downloads that could impact performance. League of Legends has two popular gameplay modes and we recorded two replays for our testing one on Summoner’s Rift and another on Howling Abyss (ARAM.) The moment when the minimum FPS occurs is at the height of an intense teamfight.

Summoner’s Rift

League of Legends Summoner's Rift League of Legends Summoner's Rift BenchmarkLeague of Legends Summoner's Rift

Benchmark Results: The ASUS STRIX GTX 950 DirectCU II OC 2GB video card and the XFX Radeon HD 6950 1GB had very close graphics performance replaying our Summoner’s Rift replay in League of Legends. We see the GTX 950 averaging 87 FPS and the HD 6950 averaging 84 FPS. Framerates were above 60 FPS at all times. CPU bottlenecking is likely occurring.

League of Legends Summoner's RiftFrame Times

Benchmark Results: Frame times for both the Radeon HD 6950 and GeForce GTX 950 were very close on Summoner’s Rift with standard deviation values from the respective video cards coming in at 2.05 and 2.04. Frame times also never spike past 50ms which could be perceivable as stutter.

Howling Abyss a.k.a. ARAM

League of Legends ARAM League of Legends ARAM BenchmarkLeague of Legends Howling Abyss

Benchmark Results: The ASUS STRIX GTX 950 DirectCU II OC 2GB video card and the XFX Radeon HD 6950 1GB had close graphics performance replaying our Howling Abyss replay in League of Legends. We see the GTX 950 averaging 107 FPS and the HD 6950 averaging 103 FPS. The minimum recorded framerate is nearly the same respectively being 73 FPS and 72 FPS. CPU bottlenecking is likely occurring.

League of Legends ARAM Frame TimesBenchmark Results: Frame times for both the Radeon HD 6950 and GeForce GTX 950 were close on Howling Abyss/ARAM with standard deviation values from the respective video cards coming in at 1.80 and 1.83. Frame times also never spike past 50ms which could be perceivable as stutter.