GeForce GTX 960 vs GeForce GTX 970M

Intro

Compare all of that to the GeForce GTX 970M, which makes use of a 28 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 924 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1000 MHz on this particular card. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 48 Rasterization Operator 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 960		7627 points
GeForce GTX 970M		7520 points
	Difference: 107 (1%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 970M		75 Watts
GeForce GTX 960		120 Watts
	Difference: 45 Watts (60%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 960 will be 17% quicker than the GeForce GTX 970M overall, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		112000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 970M		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (17%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970M is just a bit (about 2%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 960. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		73920 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 960		72128 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 1792 (2%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970M will be quite a bit (more or less 23%) faster with regards to AA than the GeForce GTX 960, and able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		44352 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 960		36064 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8288 (23%)

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill 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.