NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 vs PNY GeForce GTX 1060 XLR8 Gaming OC (VCGGTX10606XGPB-OC)

Fewer number of ROPs on the GeForce GTX 1060 XLR8 Gaming OC card is more than compensated by higher graphics frequency, and consequentially it has better pixel fill rate. Having higher 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.

Even though its graphics frequency is lower, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 graphics card comes with many more Texture Mapping Units (TMUs), which results in better texture fill rate. Better texture fill rate means that the graphics card can map more textures and/or utilize more sophisticated 3D effects for each textured picture element, which improves visual appearance of games and generated images.

Maximum Single Precision performance shows how good the GPU is at running programs, that process mainly single-precision floating point data. The performance is measured in GFLOPS, which stands for Giga (billions of) Floating Point Operations Per Second. As a rule, the more stream processors or CUDA cores the graphics unit has, and the the higher they are clocked, the better Single Precision performance will be. 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 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 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 graphics unit 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 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 graphics card comes with wider memory bus. As a consequence, it has higher memory bandwidth.