GeForce GTX 295 vs GeForce GTX 970M

Intro

Compare those specifications to the GeForce GTX 970M, which uses a 28 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 924 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1000 MHz on this card. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 48 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 970M		75 Watts
GeForce GTX 295		289 Watts
	Difference: 214 Watts (285%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 295 should be 133% faster than the GeForce GTX 970M in general, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		223776 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 970M		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 127776 (133%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 295 will be a lot (more or less 25%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GTX 970M. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		92160 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 970M		73920 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18240 (25%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA 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 295		32256 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12096 (38%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.