GeForce GTX 980 vs Geforce GTX 690

Intro

Compare those specs to the Geforce GTX 690, which uses a 28 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 915 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1502 MHz on this particular model. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 128 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

GeForce GTX 980		13552 points
Geforce GTX 690		13111 points
	Difference: 441 (3%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 980		165 Watts
Geforce GTX 690		300 Watts
	Difference: 135 Watts (82%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Geforce GTX 690 should be quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 980 in general. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		384512 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 980		224000 MB/sec
	Difference: 160512 (72%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 690 should be a lot (approximately 63%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 980. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		234240 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 980		144128 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 90112 (63%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 is a lot (more or less 23%) more effective at FSAA than the Geforce GTX 690, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		72064 Mpixels/sec
Geforce GTX 690		58560 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13504 (23%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.