GeForce GTX 260 vs GeForce GTX 970M

Intro

Compare those specs 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

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 970M		75 Watts
GeForce GTX 260		182 Watts
	Difference: 107 Watts (143%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 260 should theoretically be just a bit superior to the GeForce GTX 970M in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 260		111888 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 970M		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 15888 (17%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970M is much (approximately 101%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 260. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		73920 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 260		36864 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 37056 (101%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 970M is superior to the GeForce GTX 260, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		44352 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 260		16128 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 28224 (175%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's 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 texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. 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 output 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.