GeForce GTX 860M vs GeForce GTX 965M

Intro

Compare those specifications to the GeForce GTX 965M, which uses a 28 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 944 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1000 MHz on this particular card. It features 1024 SPUs as well as 64 Texture Address Units and 32 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 965M		5650 points
GeForce GTX 860M		4340 points
	Difference: 1310 (30%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 860M		45 Watts
GeForce GTX 965M		60 Watts
	Difference: 15 Watts (33%)

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have the exact same bandwidth, so theoretically they should perform the same. (explain)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 860M is much (approximately 27%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 965M. (explain)

GeForce GTX 860M		76512 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 965M		60416 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 16096 (27%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 965M is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 965M		30208 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 860M		12752 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17456 (137%)

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 data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.