GeForce GTS 150 vs GeForce GTX 980

Intro

Compare all that to the GeForce GTX 980, which makes use of a 28 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 1126 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1750 MHz on this particular card. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 Texture Address Units and 64 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTS 150		141 Watts
GeForce GTX 980		165 Watts
	Difference: 24 Watts (17%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 980 should be 600% quicker than the GeForce GTS 150 in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		224000 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 150		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 192000 (600%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 will be much (approximately 204%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTS 150. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		144128 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 150		47360 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 96768 (204%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 will be a lot (more or less 509%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTS 150, and able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		72064 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 150		11840 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 60224 (509%)

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.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. 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 many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.