GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 1060 Mini ITX 3G (rev. 1.0) vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970

Fewer number of ROPs on the GeForce GTX 1060 Mini ITX 3G (rev. 1.0) is more than offset by higher graphics frequency, and therefore it has better pixel fill rate. Having higher pixel fillrate allows the card to draw more pixels on screen and off screen, which is beneficial for some 3D effects in games, or when playing at higher display resolutions.

Even though the GeForce GTX 1060 Mini ITX 3G (rev. 1.0) has fewer TMUs, it is clocked higher, resulting in insignificantly better texture fill rate. Having better texture fill rate allows the graphics card to utilize more sophisticated 3D effects and/or map more textures to each textured picture element, which improves games visual appearance.

Single Precision performance shows how fast the GPU is at running programs, that use single-precision floating point numbers. The performance is expressed in GFLOPS or billions of Floating Point Operations Per Second. Generally, the more stream processors or CUDA cores the graphics unit has, and the the faster they run at, the higher Single Precision performance will be. The GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 1060 Mini ITX 3G (rev. 1.0) has an edge here. Higher single-precision performance number means the graphics card will perform better in general computing applications. Since stream processors or CUDA cores are also used as vertex and geometry shaders for 3D image generation, higher performance is also beneficial to games.

To speed up processing, the GPUs store 3D scene data, textures and intermediate data, used for image generation, in on-board memory. The video memory usually has much higher bandwidth than system RAM, and more bandwidth allows the GPU to run at higher screen resolutions, use larger and more detailed textures, and apply more complex 3D effects and filters. The bandwidth depends on memory type, speed, and memory interface width. In this case, higher memory bandwidth of the GeForce GTX 970 is due to wider memory bus.