GeForce GTX 960M vs GeForce GTX 970M

Intro

Compare those specs to the GeForce GTX 970M, which comes with a clock speed of 924 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1000 MHz. It also uses a 192-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 1280 SPUs, 80 TAUs, and 48 Raster Operation Units.

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 970M		7520 points
GeForce GTX 960M		4350 points
	Difference: 3170 (73%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 960M		65 Watts
GeForce GTX 970M		75 Watts
	Difference: 10 Watts (15%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 970M should be a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 960M overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		96000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 960M		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32000 (50%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970M is much (more or less 69%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 960M. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		73920 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 960M		43840 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 30080 (69%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 970M is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		44352 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 960M		17536 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 26816 (153%)

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 max amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better 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 video card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.