GeForce GTX 460 1GB vs GeForce GTX 980M

Intro

Compare all that to the GeForce GTX 980M, which makes use of a 28 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 1038 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1000 MHz on this specific card. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 Texture Address Units and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 980M		100 Watts
GeForce GTX 460 1GB		160 Watts
	Difference: 60 Watts (60%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 980M, in theory, should perform a small bit faster than the GeForce GTX 460 1GB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 460 1GB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 12800 (11%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980M will be a lot (approximately 164%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 460 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		99648 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 1GB		37800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 61848 (164%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980M will be a lot (more or less 208%) more effective at AA than the GeForce GTX 460 1GB, and also capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		66432 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 1GB		21600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 44832 (208%)

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 information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at handling 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 the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.