GeForce GTX 960 vs Geforce GTX 680

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Geforce GTX 680, which has GPU clock speed of 1006 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1502 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1536 Stream Processors, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

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 680		7650 points
GeForce GTX 960		7627 points
	Difference: 23 (0%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Geforce GTX 680		16 Mh/s
GeForce GTX 960		11 Mh/s
	Difference: 5 (45%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 960		120 Watts
Geforce GTX 680		195 Watts
	Difference: 75 Watts (63%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Geforce GTX 680 should theoretically be quite a bit superior to the GeForce GTX 960 in general. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		192256 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 960		112000 MB/sec
	Difference: 80256 (72%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 680 is a lot (more or less 79%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 960. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		128768 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 960		72128 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 56640 (79%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 960 is a small bit (about 12%) better at FSAA than the Geforce GTX 680, and also capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		36064 Mpixels/sec
Geforce GTX 680		32192 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3872 (12%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.