GeForce GTX 960 vs GeForce GTX 970

Intro

The GeForce GTX 960 makes use of a 28 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 1127 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1750 MHz on this specific model. It features 1024 SPUs along with 64 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare that to the GeForce GTX 970, which makes use of a 28 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 1050 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1750 MHz on this card. It features 1664 SPUs along with 104 TAUs and 64 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, 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 maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.