GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 970 Gaming vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970

Because two GPUs have the same number of ROPs and the GeForce GTX 970 Gaming graphics card has higher operating frequency, its pixel fillrate is higher. Better maximum pixel fill rate means that the graphics card can draw more pixels on and off screen each second, increasing overall performance, unless there are bottlenecks somewhere else.

In modern games, pixel fillrate is not as important as texture fill rate. This parameter is proportional to graphics frequency and the number of TMUs. Since both graphics cards have the same number of Texture Mapping Units (TMUs) and the GeForce GTX 970 Gaming operates at higher rate, its texture fillrate is higher. Better texture fill rate means that the GPU can apply more textures and/or use more sophisticated 3D effects for each texel, which improves visual appearance of games and generated images.

Single Precision performance indicates how good the card is at executing applications, that utilize single-precision floating point numbers. The performance is measured in billions of Floating Point Operations Per Second, or GFLOPS. All single-precision calculations are performed by stream processors or CUDA cores, as such the more cores / processors the graphics card has the better. Performance also depends on the processor clock rate. The GeForce GTX 970 Gaming is faster here. Higher single-precision performance number means the graphics card 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.

Maximum Double Precision performance is similar to the Single Precision performance, except that it applies to double-precision (64-bit) floating point operations. Since games do not use double-precision arithmetics, this characteristic is unimportant to games performance. The GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 970 Gaming has an edge here.

Memory bandwidth of both graphics cards is identical.