So I was really excited to get this new 4gb gtx960.  I work at a restaurant so I don't usually splurge but tax time came around and I got a refund.  A couple of months ago I bought an EVGA GT730 and it ran much better than I thought.  I could play every game on high except Skyrim which wouldn't play at all on Ubuntu Linux 14.04 because the FPS was about 15 on high and maybe 20 on medium.   But I play EVE online and it played great,  SOMA ran good with a bit of stuttering,  and Grimrock 2 ran great.   4k  videos were OK but the MAIN issue was that HVEC ran terribly.
 
So I bought this 4gb GTX 960 which I'm thinking wow, great reviews,  based on GTX900 chipset,  gotta run great.   Also,  HDMI 2.0 and RUNS HVEC ON THE HARDWARE ITSELF.   That's GREAT.
 
So I install it,  still can't run Skyrim?  Maybe 20 fps on ultra and 25 on high?  That's not enough..... ****?  Is this the card I've been hearing about?   So I'm thinking well,  at least it can do HVEC with hardware.  So I load up VLC and try a few HVEC encoded videos that I have downloaded.   ALL of them run at 100 percent for every cpu like 550 percent.   NO GPU use at all.  Where is the HVEC decoding?  What the heck did I just pay 221 dollars for?  This card is maybe 15 percent faster than the GT730 but it still makes Skyrim unplayable,  it won't run HVEC despite claiming to run it... and that is the reason I bought it..... and it definitely doesn't do any of the things it claims to or run NEAR The speed people are claiming it runs it.  Can't even run Skyrim.
 
My system: 
 
AMD FX6300  @ stock 3.5
8 gig Corsair XMS DDR3
240gb SSD
4gb GTX 960 EVGA SSC w ACX 2.0
550w PSU
On Xubuntu 14.04 LTS 64 bit.
 
BTW the temp on the GPU is about 51 which is twice as high as the GT730  but the temp on the CPU is like 20 all the time which makes me think it needs to be overclocked soon.   Also the fans on the GPU always spin,  even though it has ACX 2.0 but they are really quiet.
 
 
 
 

Your video card appears to be performing as it should.
 
Skyrim will play poorly on your computer regardless of which video card you have installed.  This is because the game does not support Linux and you are using WINE to play the game in a virtual machine with limited hardware acceleration support.  If you want to test your video card's performance, don't use a hacked together work-around as your benchmark.
 
As far as I can tell, GPU decoding HEVC support is virtually non-existent in Linux right now due to lack of NVIDIA Linux driver support.
 
I would recommend considering overclocking your CPU if you want to see some easy performance gains.

I think if i remember correctly i had the same issue with the same two cards. but i had forgotten to install the new drivers.. im thinking about using both cards and seeing if there are any driver issues or if its compatible lmao