GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 1060 Mini ITX 3G (rev. 1.0) vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980

Although the GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 1060 Mini ITX 3G (rev. 1.0) has fewer ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines), it runs at higher frequency, which results in better pixel fill rate. Having higher pixel fillrate allows the graphics 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 its graphics clock is lower, the GeForce GTX 980 GPU comes with many more TMUs (Texture Mapping Units), resulting in better texture fill rate. Better maximum texture fill rate means that the graphics card can map more textures, utilize more complex 3D effects for each textured picture element, or render 3D image / game environment at higher resolutions without loss of detail.

Single Precision performance is convenient for estimating card's maximum speed in programs, that process only single-precision floating point data. The performance is measured in GFLOPS or billions of Floating Point Operations Per Second. All single-precision calculations are performed by stream processors or CUDA cores, therefore the more cores / processors the GPU has the better. Performance also depends on the processor clock rate. The GeForce GTX 980 graphics card is faster here. Higher single-precision performance number means the GPU will perform better in general computing applications. Since CUDA cores or stream processors 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 graphics unit to run at higher screen resolutions, use larger and more detailed textures, and apply more complex 3D effects and filters. The bandwidth is dependent on a few components, such as memory type, speed, and width of memory interface. Specifically, higher memory bandwidth of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 is due to wider memory bus.