GeForce GTX 960 vs GeForce GTX 980

Intro

Compare all that to the GeForce GTX 980, which has a clock frequency of 1126 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1750 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It features 2048 SPUs, 128 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 980		13552 points
GeForce GTX 960		7627 points
	Difference: 5925 (78%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

GeForce GTX 980		408 Sol/s
GeForce GTX 960		154 Sol/s
	Difference: 254 (165%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

GeForce GTX 980		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 980		165 Watts
	Difference: 45 Watts (38%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 980, in theory, should be a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 960 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		224000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 960		112000 MB/sec
	Difference: 112000 (100%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 will be much (approximately 100%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 960. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		144128 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 960		72128 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 72000 (100%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 980 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		72064 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 960		36064 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 36000 (100%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses 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 texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better 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 amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.