GeForce GTX 970 vs GeForce GTX 980M

Intro

Compare those specs to the GeForce GTX 980M, which uses a 28 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 1038 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1000 MHz on this particular card. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 Texture Address Units and 64 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 970		10867 points
GeForce GTX 980M		9476 points
	Difference: 1391 (15%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

GeForce GTX 970		262 Sol/s
GeForce GTX 980M		155 Sol/s
	Difference: 107 (69%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 980M		100 Watts
GeForce GTX 970		145 Watts
	Difference: 45 Watts (45%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 970 should be 75% quicker than the GeForce GTX 980M in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		224000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 980M		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 96000 (75%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970 is a bit (about 10%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 980M. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		109200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 980M		99648 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 9552 (10%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 970 is the winner, though not by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		67200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 980M		66432 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 768 (1%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better 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 can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video 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 maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. 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 quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.