NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M

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

Benchmark Score
Other Benchmarks
Specifications
Comments (0)
Popular Comparisons

GPU Comparison

Quickly search and compare graphics cards

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

1419 points

1650 points

16% slightly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

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

29 FPS

32 FPS

2 FPS slightly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

22 FPS

25 FPS

3 FPS slightly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

20 FPS

22 FPS

2 FPS slightly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

17 FPS

21 FPS

3 FPS slightly higher Clouds frame rate

Free GPU Benchmark

Want to compare your graphics card against the GeForce GTX 960 and the GeForce GTX 980M? Download our free and quick PC Performance Test.

Download GPU Benchmark

Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

2293 points

2939 points

28% slightly higher 3DMark Graphics score

Blender score

Cycles Render (Samples per minute)

167.72 points

264.38 points

57% significantly higher Blender score

Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

CUDA compute benchmark

17784 points

21520 points

21% slightly higher Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

21072 points

23785 points

12% slightly higher Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

22380 points

26093 points

16% slightly higher Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

19796 points

24516 points

23% slightly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

20845 points

23881 points

14% slightly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1127 MHz

8% slightly higher core clock speed

1038 MHz

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1178 MHz

4% slightly higher boost clock speed

1127 MHz

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

160.4 GB/s

42% significantly higher memory bandwidth

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

120 W

100 W

20% slightly lower TDP

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

37.7 Gigapixels/s

72.13 Gigapixels/s

91% significantly higher pixel rate

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

75.39 Gigatexels/s

108.2 Gigatexels/s

43% significantly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

2.41 TFLOPS

3.46 TFLOPS

43% significantly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

1024

1536

49% significantly more shading units

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

49% 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

231st of 586

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2015 January

2014 October

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 980M specs and performance

In our benchmarks, the GeForce GTX 980M beats the GeForce GTX 960 in gaming performance.

The GeForce GTX 960 has a slightly higher core clock speed. This is the frequency at which the graphics core is running at. While not necessarily an indicator of overall performance, this metric can be useful when comparing two GPUs based on the same architecture. In addition, the GeForce GTX 960 also 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. If you're planning at playing games at high resolutions with high-quality textures, you will need a lot of memory.

In addition, the GeForce GTX 980M has a slightly lower TDP at 100 W when compared to the GeForce GTX 960 at 120 W. TDP (Thermal Design Power) measures total heat output from the chip.

In terms of raw gaming performance in our GPU benchmark, the GeForce GTX 980M is better than the GeForce GTX 960.