GeForce GTX 260 vs GeForce GTX 980M

Intro

Compare all of that to the GeForce GTX 980M, which features core clock speeds of 1038 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 Texture Address Units and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 980M		100 Watts
GeForce GTX 260		182 Watts
	Difference: 82 Watts (82%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 980M should theoretically be a small bit superior to the GeForce GTX 260 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 260		111888 MB/sec
	Difference: 16112 (14%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980M should be quite a bit (approximately 170%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 260. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		99648 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 260		36864 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 62784 (170%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 980M is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		66432 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 260		16128 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 50304 (312%)

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 largest amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. 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 higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs 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 fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.