GeForce GTX 860M vs GeForce GTX 960M

Intro

Compare all of that to the GeForce GTX 960M, which uses a 28 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 1096 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this card. It features 640 SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 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 960M		4350 points
GeForce GTX 860M		4340 points
	Difference: 10 (0%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 860M		45 Watts
GeForce GTX 960M		65 Watts
	Difference: 20 Watts (44%)

Memory Bandwidth

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

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 860M will be much (approximately 75%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GTX 960M. (explain)

GeForce GTX 860M		76512 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 960M		43840 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 32672 (75%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 960M is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960M		17536 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 860M		12752 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4784 (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.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.