GeForce GTX 970 vs GeForce GTX 980M

Intro

Compare those specifications to the GeForce GTX 980M, which uses a 28 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 1038 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1000 MHz on this particular card. It features 1536 SPUs along with 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 970		10867 points
GeForce GTX 980M		9476 points
	Difference: 1391 (15%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

GeForce GTX 970		262 Sol/s
GeForce GTX 980M		155 Sol/s
	Difference: 107 (69%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 980M		100 Watts
GeForce GTX 970		145 Watts
	Difference: 45 Watts (45%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX 970 should perform much faster than the GeForce GTX 980M in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		224000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 980M		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 96000 (75%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970 will be a bit (about 10%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GTX 980M. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		109200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 980M		99648 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 9552 (10%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 970 is superior to the GeForce GTX 980M, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		67200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 980M		66432 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 768 (1%)

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 data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.