GeForce GTX 460 vs GeForce GTX 960

Intro

Compare all of that to the GeForce GTX 960, which makes use of a 28 nm design. nVidia has set the core speed at 1127 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1750 MHz on this particular card. It features 1024 SPUs along with 64 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 960		7627 points
GeForce GTX 460		2557 points
	Difference: 5070 (198%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 960		120 Watts
GeForce GTX 460		150 Watts
	Difference: 30 Watts (25%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 960 should be 30% quicker than the GeForce GTX 460 in general, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		112000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 460		86400 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (30%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 960 is a lot (more or less 91%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 460. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		72128 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 460		37800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 34328 (91%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 960 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		36064 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 460		16200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 19864 (123%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 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, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on 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 ability to reach the max fill rate.