GeForce GTX 950 vs GeForce GTX 980

Intro

Compare those specifications to the GeForce GTX 980, which makes use of a 28 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 1126 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1750 MHz on this specific card. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 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 950		6536 points
	Difference: 7016 (107%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

GeForce GTX 980		20 Mh/s
GeForce GTX 950		10 Mh/s
	Difference: 10 (100%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

GeForce GTX 980		408 Sol/s
GeForce GTX 950		155 Sol/s
	Difference: 253 (163%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 950		90 Watts
GeForce GTX 980		165 Watts
	Difference: 75 Watts (83%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 980 should in theory perform a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 950 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		224000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 950		105728 MB/sec
	Difference: 118272 (112%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 is a lot (about 193%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GTX 950. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		144128 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 950		49152 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 94976 (193%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 980 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		72064 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 950		32768 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 39296 (120%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core 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 rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.