GeForce GTX 1070 vs GeForce GTX 980

Intro

The GeForce GTX 1070 features a GPU core clock speed of 1506 MHz, and the 8192 MB of GDDR5 memory is set to run at 2000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1920 SPUs, 120 Texture Address Units, and 64 Raster Operation Units.

Compare all of that to the GeForce GTX 980, which features clock speeds of 1126 MHz on the GPU, and 1750 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 TAUs and 64 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the 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 amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.