MSI Geforce GTX 970 OC 4GB vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN

The maximum pixel fillrate is dependent on graphics clock rate and the number of ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines). The Geforce GTX 970 OC 4GB has an edge in this area, as it operates at higher frequency and has more ROPs. Having better pixel fillrate allows the GPU 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.

Although its graphics clock rate is lower, the GeForce GTX TITAN graphics card comes with many more TMUs, resulting in significantly better texture fill rate. Having better texture fill rate allows the GPU to use more sophisticated 3D effects and/or apply more textures to each texel, which improves games visual appearance.

Single Precision performance is useful for estimating card's maximum speed in programs, that process primarily single-precision floating point data. The performance is measured in GFLOPS, which stands for Giga (billions of) Floating Point Operations Per Second. Generally, the faster stream processors or CUDA cores run at, and the more cores / processors the graphics unit has, the higher Single Precision performance will be. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN is faster 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.

Maximum Double Precision performance is similar to the Single Precision performance, except that it applies to double-precision (64-bit) floating point operations. This characteristic is unimportant to games performance because games do not use double-precision arithmetics. The GeForce GTX TITAN has a substantial advantage here.

To speed up processing, the graphics cards 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 width of memory interface. Specifically, the GeForce GTX TITAN offers wider memory bus. As such, it has higher memory bandwidth.