GeForce GTX 970 vs GeForce GTX 980

Intro

Compare those specs to the GeForce GTX 980, which makes use of a 28 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 1126 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1750 MHz on this particular card. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 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 980		13552 points
GeForce GTX 970		10867 points
	Difference: 2685 (25%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

GeForce GTX 980		408 Sol/s
GeForce GTX 970		262 Sol/s
	Difference: 146 (56%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

GeForce GTX 980		20 Mh/s
GeForce GTX 970		19 Mh/s
	Difference: 1 (5%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 970		145 Watts
GeForce GTX 980		165 Watts
	Difference: 20 Watts (14%)

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have the exact same memory bandwidth, so in theory they should have identical performance. (explain)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 will be much (about 32%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 970. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		144128 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 970		109200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 34928 (32%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 is a small bit (about 7%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 970, and also should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		72064 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 970		67200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4864 (7%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better 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 chip could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.