GeForce GTX 950 vs GeForce GTX 970M

Intro

Compare that to the GeForce GTX 970M, which comes with core speeds of 924 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 Texture Address Units and 48 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 970M		7520 points
GeForce GTX 950		6536 points
	Difference: 984 (15%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 970M		75 Watts
GeForce GTX 950		90 Watts
	Difference: 15 Watts (20%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 950, in theory, should be a little bit faster than the GeForce GTX 970M overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 950		105728 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 970M		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 9728 (10%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970M should be quite a bit (more or less 50%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 950. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		73920 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 950		49152 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24768 (50%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 970M is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		44352 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 950		32768 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11584 (35%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better 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 texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.