NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 4 GB vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 4 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

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Specifications
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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980

Price

The cheapest price from our partner retailers

$ 265.00

$ 614.85 significantly less expensive

$ 879.85

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

1419 points

2494 points

75% significantly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

Volumetric ray casting test, a computationally expensive method of rendering high-quality scenes

29 FPS

52 FPS

23 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

22 FPS

41 FPS

19 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

20 FPS

36 FPS

16 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

17 FPS

33 FPS

15 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

Free GPU Benchmark

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

2293 points

4376 points

90% significantly higher 3DMark Graphics score

Blender score

Cycles Render (Samples per minute)

167.72 points

367.38 points

119% significantly higher Blender score

Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

CUDA compute benchmark

17784 points

29848 points

67% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

Geekbench 5 (Metal) score

Metal compute benchmark

8773 points

15163 points

72% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (Metal) score

Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

21072 points

33463 points

58% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

22380 points

41306 points

84% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Geekbench 6 (Metal) score

Metal compute benchmark

8773 points

15163 points

72% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Metal) score

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

19796 points

34611 points

74% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

20845 points

38178 points

83% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1127 MHz

0.09% slightly higher core clock speed

1126 MHz

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1178 MHz

1216 MHz

3% slightly higher boost clock speed

Memory

Onboard memory size for textures and vertices

4 GiB

Identical

4 GiB

Memory Bus Width

Number of parallel lines to the memory chips

128 Bit

256 Bit

100% significantly larger memory bus width

Memory Bandwidth

Data transfer speed between GPU core and memory

112.2 GB/s

224.4 GB/s

100% significantly higher memory bandwidth

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

120 W

37% slightly lower TDP

165 W

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

37.7 Gigapixels/s

77.82 Gigapixels/s

106% significantly higher pixel rate

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

75.39 Gigatexels/s

155.6 Gigatexels/s

106% significantly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

2.41 TFLOPS

4.98 TFLOPS

106% significantly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

1024

2048

100% significantly more shading units

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

128

100% significantly more texture mapping units

Render Output Processors

Number of processors dedicated to final pixel rendering

100% significantly more render output processors

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

239th of 586

177th of 586

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2015 January

2014 September

Memory Type

The type of memory used by this chip

GDDR5

DirectX Support

Maximum version of DirectX supported

12.0

OpenGL Support

Maximum version of OpenGL supported

4.5

GeForce GTX 960 vs GeForce GTX 980 specs and performance

According to the hardwareDB Benchmark, the GeForce GTX 980 GPU is faster than the GeForce GTX 960 in gaming.

Our database shows that the GeForce GTX 960 has a slightly higher core clock speed. The core clock speed (or base speed) is the frequency at which the GPU core runs. This metric makes sense when comparing GPUs of a similar architecture or generation. Despite this, the GeForce GTX 980 has a slightly higher boost clock speed: the maximum frequency the chip can reach if power delivery and thermals allow.

Furthermore, the spec sheet for both these GPUs show that they both have the same amount of memory at 4 GiB. Memory size doesn't directly affect performance, but too little memory will certainly degrade gaming performance.

In addition, the GeForce GTX 960 has a slightly lower TDP at 120 W when compared to the GeForce GTX 980 at 165 W. TDP (Thermal Design Power) measures total heat output from the chip.

In conclusion, all specs and GPU benchmarks considered, will recommend the GeForce GTX 980 over the GeForce GTX 960.