GeForce GTX 960 vs GeForce GTX 970M

Intro

Compare all of that to the GeForce GTX 970M, which uses a 28 nm design. nVidia has set the core speed at 924 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1000 MHz on this model. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 TAUs and 48 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 960		7627 points
GeForce GTX 970M		7520 points
	Difference: 107 (1%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 970M		75 Watts
GeForce GTX 960		120 Watts
	Difference: 45 Watts (60%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 960 should in theory be just a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 970M in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		112000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 970M		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (17%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970M will be a bit (approximately 2%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 960. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		73920 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 960		72128 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 1792 (2%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 970M is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		44352 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 960		36064 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8288 (23%)

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 max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.