GeForce GTX 960 vs GeForce GTX 970

Intro

Compare all of that to the GeForce GTX 970, which has core clock speeds of 1050 MHz on the GPU, and 1750 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1664 SPUs as well as 104 Texture Address Units and 64 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 970		10867 points
GeForce GTX 960		7627 points
	Difference: 3240 (42%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

GeForce GTX 970		262 Sol/s
GeForce GTX 960		154 Sol/s
	Difference: 108 (70%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

GeForce GTX 970		19 Mh/s
GeForce GTX 960		11 Mh/s
	Difference: 8 (73%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 960		120 Watts
GeForce GTX 970		145 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (21%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 970 should in theory perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 960 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		224000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 960		112000 MB/sec
	Difference: 112000 (100%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970 should be quite a bit (more or less 51%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 960. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		109200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 960		72128 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 37072 (51%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 970 is superior to the GeForce GTX 960, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		67200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 960		36064 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 31136 (86%)

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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.