GeForce GTX 480 vs GeForce GTX 970M

Intro

Compare that to the GeForce GTX 970M, which features GPU clock speed of 924 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1000 MHz through a 192-bit bus. It also is made up of 1280 SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 48 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 970M		7520 points
GeForce GTX 480		3650 points
	Difference: 3870 (106%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 970M		75 Watts
GeForce GTX 480		250 Watts
	Difference: 175 Watts (233%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 480, in theory, should perform a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 970M overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		177408 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 970M		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 81408 (85%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970M is a lot (about 76%) better at AF than the GeForce GTX 480. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		73920 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 480		42000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 31920 (76%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970M is quite a bit (more or less 32%) faster with regards to FSAA than the GeForce GTX 480, and will be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		44352 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 480		33600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10752 (32%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip 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 Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.