GeForce GTX 950 vs GeForce GTX 960

Intro

Compare all that to the GeForce GTX 960, which features a clock frequency of 1127 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1750 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It features 1024 SPUs, 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 950		6536 points
	Difference: 1091 (17%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

GeForce GTX 960		11 Mh/s
GeForce GTX 950		10 Mh/s
	Difference: 1 (10%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

GeForce GTX 950		155 Sol/s
GeForce GTX 960		154 Sol/s
	Difference: 1 (1%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 950		90 Watts
GeForce GTX 960		120 Watts
	Difference: 30 Watts (33%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GTX 960 should in theory be a small bit superior to the GeForce GTX 950 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		112000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 950		105728 MB/sec
	Difference: 6272 (6%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 960 should be quite a bit (about 47%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 950. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		72128 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 950		49152 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 22976 (47%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 960 is superior to the GeForce GTX 950, though not by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		36064 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 950		32768 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3296 (10%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines 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 many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.