GeForce GTX 260 vs GeForce GTX 970M

Intro

Compare those specifications to the GeForce GTX 970M, which has a core clock frequency of 924 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1000 MHz. It also uses a 192-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 1280 SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 48 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 970M		75 Watts
GeForce GTX 260		182 Watts
	Difference: 107 Watts (143%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 260, in theory, should perform a little bit faster than the GeForce GTX 970M in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 260		111888 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 970M		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 15888 (17%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970M is a lot (approximately 101%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 260. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		73920 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 260		36864 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 37056 (101%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 970M is superior to the GeForce GTX 260, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		44352 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 260		16128 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 28224 (175%)

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 MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This number 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 graphics 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 most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.