GeForce GTX 960 vs GeForce GTX 980M

Intro

Compare those specs to the GeForce GTX 980M, which has GPU clock speed of 1038 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1536 Stream Processors, 96 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 980M		9476 points
GeForce GTX 960		7627 points
	Difference: 1849 (24%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

GeForce GTX 980M		155 Sol/s
GeForce GTX 960		154 Sol/s
	Difference: 1 (1%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 980M		100 Watts
GeForce GTX 960		120 Watts
	Difference: 20 Watts (20%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GTX 980M should in theory be a little bit better than the GeForce GTX 960 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 960		112000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (14%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980M will be quite a bit (approximately 38%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 960. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		99648 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 960		72128 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 27520 (38%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980M is much (about 84%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 960, and able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		66432 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 960		36064 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 30368 (84%)

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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. 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 processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.