GeForce GTX 1060 vs GeForce GTX 980

Intro

The GeForce GTX 1060 makes use of a 16 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 1506 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 2000 MHz on this particular model. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 48 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specifications to the GeForce GTX 980, which has a clock speed of 1126 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1750 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 2048 SPUs, 128 TAUs, and 64 Raster Operation Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is worked out 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 graphics card will be at 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 chip can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated 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 output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.