GeForce GTX 1080 vs GeForce GTX 960

Intro

Compare all that to the GeForce GTX 960, which comes with a clock speed of 1127 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1750 MHz. It also features a 128-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It features 1024 SPUs, 64 Texture Address Units, and 32 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 1080		21942 points
GeForce GTX 960		7627 points
	Difference: 14315 (188%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

GeForce GTX 1080		553 Sol/s
GeForce GTX 960		154 Sol/s
	Difference: 399 (259%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

GeForce GTX 1080		20 Mh/s
GeForce GTX 960		11 Mh/s
	Difference: 9 (82%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 960		120 Watts
GeForce GTX 1080		180 Watts
	Difference: 60 Watts (50%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GTX 1080 should in theory be quite a bit better than the GeForce GTX 960 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1080		327680 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 960		112000 MB/sec
	Difference: 215680 (193%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 1080 will be much (approximately 256%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GTX 960. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1080		257120 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 960		72128 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 184992 (256%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 1080 is superior to the GeForce GTX 960, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1080		102848 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 960		36064 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 66784 (185%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR 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 by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.