Nvidia turned up the heat of AMD's Radeon product range late last year when it released its latest GPUs based on the Maxwell microarchitecture. The GeForce GTX 980 delivered previously unseen performance from a single GPU and even at $550 it was a sort after product.

The GTX 980 wasn't our first look at the Maxwell architecture as the GTX 750 Ti gave us a glimpse of what was to come 8 months prior. Priced at $150 the GTX 750 Ti was designed to go head-to-head with AMD's R7 265.

The Radeon R7 265 wasn't a particularly impressive GPU for the simple fact that the R7 270 and R7 270X didn't cost much more at the time but delivered noticeably better performance.