780s are more expensive than 960s because all of this is heavily margin. there aren't many guys making modern day GPUs, and GPUs are fairly expensive to design, fabricate, test, mass-produce. this means that things are expensive and then you take the margin into accounts and things get really expensive. so the company can turn a profit selling a 960 but turn a bigger profit selling a 780 for even more money even though the 960 is still a huge chunk of performance of the 780.

the 780 will have a larger, more complicated chip. [ <<second edit: and this is also not strictly true. sometimes it's the same chip but the circuit is simplified because parts of it have been disabled for the lower card because the chip didn't come out perfect] probably alongside more, better-binned memory and possibly better board components (those come from the board partner but they still affect the final cost). that more complicated chip is difficult to get out of the oven intact. or it might be the same chip but one that came out of the oven perfect and the 960 was one that came out a little screwed up so they test it, disable the broken parts, and sell it as a 960. (I don't actually recall the specifics now beyond that 780 is Kepler and 960 is Maxwell. just to clarify, this never happened and couldn't with those two cards. Kepler and Maxwell are two different architectures, separated by years, and a different fabrication process << NO. SAME PROCESS. BETTER ARCHITECTURE. KEPLER GETS LESS ATTENTION FOR DRIVER UPDATES)

but as to getting a 960. wait. and as for the 780, the answer is probably don't, because that architecture is aging, there has been a new node jump this year (new production line was opened at the factory type thing. makes tinier chips. tinier chips means more logic on the chip, faster chips), and Kepler was already shown to be a second-class citizen in the face of Maxwell at the end of 2014 and in 2015. now we're on Pascal. not saying you shouldn't necessarily. maybe you found a good deal somewhere. point is, just know what you're doing. do research. ask on PC enthusiast communities.

so for the 960, wait. Polaris (AMD's newest) will drop in a few days. this is a very interesting card from a performance standpoint. (970-980 level perf with 8gb for $250) this will be a very interesting card for many folks and will prompt price cuts everywhere on nvidia's shitty, shady side of things.

This is what was confusing me - so it sounds like from a performance standpoint (yes?) the 960 IS the "better" card, the 780 was just a higher performing card with better architecture that was since surpassed by a cheaper card that was easier to fabricate?

I keep hearing this but I've gotten paranoid recently. The cards I've been looking at have been getting MORE expensive LOL. It's almost like everyone saw the Titan release and thought "Well, damn no way am I getting that thing and the price of "CARD X" hasn't dropped, so I might as well just get a 960" and boom all of a sudden they're jumping into the ~$250 dollar range, where they used to be closer to $175 - $200.

No. 960 does not perform nearly as well as the 780. If these were boats, the 780 would be an aircraft carrier, and the 960 a destroyer. The 960 is a newer, shinier, more advanced destroyer. It's still not match for the aircraft carrier. I do not know whether Maxwell's design had influences with the goal of reducing cost to produce (usually higher yields aka more good chips out of the oven), or if the 16nm process node at TSMC was designed with reducing production cost (probably was I guess). in any event it's not a case of Maxwell being a much easier chip to make than the Kepler chip in the 780. the 960 is simply newer, has tinier and better transistors << NO. SAME PROCESS NODE. 28NM. JUST IMPROVED ARCHITECTURE, and the full attentions (or at least before Pascal hit) of the nivida driver team. the 960 will itself be likely made from "bad" 980 chips.

yes, sadly. things are getting worse. as volumes drop, margins will rise. a couple years ago when the whole "PC is dying" (and I don't mean "PC is dying" in the gamer nomenclature) thing started, there were some deals because sellers were trying to prevent contraction. well that's happened anyway and the news is always the same each quarter. so margins will rise. if I guessed, I would say that the reason the 960s are selling higher is because nobody's buying now (waiting for the new cards). so the few that are are doing so against the waves and 99 times out of 100 they try to get more from that guy because they can. they usually say things like "auto pricing scheme. stock is lower. prices automatically go up." who knows how much truth there is in that. if your 960 is $260 now, may be a good idea just to wait.

best thing to do would be to ask on a PC enthusiast forum.

edit: like I said, specifics were fuzzy. and I made one big mistake. I said Maxwell had a better process than Kepler. it didn't. both on 28nm. Maxwell is just a better architecture and the driver team was writing for it instead of Kepler. this should emphasise the new node even more.

Just wait for a month, or couple of months.
If amd can keep suppling the market with enough 460-470-480 at the promised price and performance levels, then it's a guarantee that the prices will go down on nvidia side (or new, more powerful cards will be released at cheaper prices).
If you buy now, before the amd launch, you are screwing yourself for sure.

Good deal thanks, I've been waiting a long time (about every year right around this time, for the last two years or so LOL). My current card still runs what I play how I want to play it I just figured stuff "around the corner" might be the games that finally tax / surpass it.

I REALLY hate the current naming conventions for cards. The 780 is a superior card to the 960? Wait, so the cheap 750 must be close to the 960 at a MUCH lower price - no, it's a piece of garbage? CONFUSED! ;) So where do the 660 / 670 stand? The middle - no - totally different??? *head explodes*

What he said, mostly. I have an MSI GTX 960 4G myself, and have been pretty happy with its performance, but right now it's probably best to wait. With new GPUs and potential price cuts incoming in the foreseeable future, it wouldn't be wise to make any rushed purchases now.

Either get one of the new AMD GPUs, wait for a similar GPU from Nvidia, or just wait for the prices of the current GPUs to drop, once all the new hardware is available.

The naming/numbers used to confuse me too. I only occasionally buy new hardware, and it's been only in recent years that I finally began to understand what those numbers actually mean. Generally the first number is the GPU generation, and the second part is its performance level. So X50 and below is generally considered low or budget tier, X60 and X70 is Mid/High performance level, and X80 and up is High end/enthusiast hardware and priced accordingly. This also explains why a GTX 780 outperforms a GTX 960, at least in terms of raw processing power. ( But for various reasons I'd still advise you to buy a GPU from 9XX line or something more recent, instead of the older generations. )

My apologies for reviving this thread, but I saw a video that reminded me of it. I remembered that Crackpot had an FX 6300 processor, so I thought it might be interesting to link to a video where someone actually tested to what degree the FX 6300 bottlenecks the RX 480:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B58ciXUTlA8