Is the GeForce GTX 960 worth the extra cost over the GTX 750 Ti?

Question

Today I acquired an eVGA GeForce 960 FTW card with 2GB of GDDR5 VRAM to test against my main PC's existing GeForce GTX 750 Ti (also with 2GB of GDDR5 VRAM).
But first, here's my impetus:
Despite the fact that the GTX 750 Ti was newer than my now-sold GTX 660, I felt that the GTX 750 Ti was a sizable downgrade from the GTX 660 in some ways, and equal to the GTX 660 in others. In particular, the results of the GTX 750 Ti during the encoding test from the PPBM8 MPEG-2 DVD timeline was nearly 30 percent slower than the GTX 660 (50 seconds versus 36 seconds) - but in the encoding test from the H.264 Blu-ray timeline, the two cards were practically equal in performance (at about 135 seconds).
And today, when I shopped for an eVGA GTX 960, I found four different models: The Superclocked edition (slightly overclocked but with the reference NVidia blower-type cooler), the ACX 2.0 (upgraded cooler but only reference GPU and memory clocks), the SSC edition (overclocked to 1279 MHz on the GPU, with the ACX 2.0 cooler) and the FTW edition (ACX 2.0 cooler, overclocked to 1304 MHz). All the listed clock speeds are the non-Turbo clocks.
Back to my purchase:
At my local chain big-box store, the FTW edition sells for $220 - but another big-box store wants $230 for the SSC edition.
I brought home the FTW edition, and installed it into my i7-4790K main rig. The CPU is set to its default Turbo clocks while the system's DDR3-1600 RAM is set to run at its XMP profile.
Here are the MPEG-2 DVD and H.264 Blu-ray scores with both cards:
MPEG-2 DVD (MPE On)
MSI GTX 750 Ti OC Edition: 50 seconds
eVGA GTX 960 FTW Edition: 44 seconds
H.264 Blu-ray (MPE On)
MSI GTX 750 Ti OC Edition: 135 seconds
eVGA GTX 960 FTW Edition: 114 seconds
As one can see, the GTX 960 is 13.6 to 18.4 percent faster than the GTX 750 Ti. However, while my GTX 750 Ti cost $155 (and still costs that much at the big box store I went to earlier in the day - the one that sells the GTX 960 SSC for $230), is the FTW edition of the GTX 960 worth the extra $65? Well, that depends on which GTX 750 Ti and which GTX 960 that you might be considering for a PC based on a mainstream quad-core Intel platform.
So, based on the particular results that I posted in this post, do you think that the GTX 960 is worth the extra bucks over the GTX 750 Ti? I would love to hear/see your opinion(s).

Answer 1

Randall,
While I certainly value the PPBM6 benchmark to compare various hardware and configuration settings, the GPU performance that is most important to me is simply playing back timelines smoothly with playback set for full resolution (vs. 1/2, 1/4, etc.) and scrubbing with the upmost in responsiveness. It may be difficult to measure playback smoothness, but you can use the dropped frame counter to compare various hardware.
If playback is smooth and I can scrub my timelines effortlessly, then how fast it takes to render a finished project out just really doesn't matter that much.
Even though you are mostly working with 1080 resolution media now, it may not hurt to try some more difficult media as well (aka RED 4k, PPBM H.264 timeline, etc.)
Regards,
Jim