GeForce GTX 960M vs GeForce GTX 980

Intro

Compare all that to the GeForce GTX 980, which comes with clock speeds of 1126 MHz on the GPU, and 1750 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 Texture Address Units and 64 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 980		13552 points
GeForce GTX 960M		4350 points
	Difference: 9202 (212%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 960M		65 Watts
GeForce GTX 980		165 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (154%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 980 should theoretically be a lot superior to the GeForce GTX 960M overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		224000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 960M		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 160000 (250%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 is a lot (more or less 229%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 960M. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		144128 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 960M		43840 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 100288 (229%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 is quite a bit (approximately 311%) faster with regards to FSAA than the GeForce GTX 960M, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		72064 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 960M		17536 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 54528 (311%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. 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 fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.