GeForce GTX 960 vs Geforce GTX 680

Intro

Compare all that to the Geforce GTX 680, which comes with a clock speed of 1006 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1502 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 1536 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation 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 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

Theoretically speaking, the Geforce GTX 680 should perform quite a bit faster than 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 much (about 79%) faster with regards to AF 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 little bit (approximately 12%) more effective at FSAA than the Geforce GTX 680, and should be able to handle higher resolutions better. (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 data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, 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 AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core 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 is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.