NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M vs GeForce GTX 970M – benchmarks and gaming tests

LaptopMedia.com Highlights NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M vs GeForce GTX 970M - benchmarks and gaming tests

From: Rossen Pandev 25 September 2015 / 11:46 | 0

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With the release of the new laptop-grade GeForce GTX 980 GPU, NVIDIA has set apart even further its top three mobile GPUs currently on the market and it’s about time we see the real difference between them. We will need some time to get our hands on the new mobile GTX 980 graphics card, but until then here’s a thorough comparison between the GTX 980M and GTX 970M.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M is a high-end graphics chip, announced on October 7, 2014. It will be available in models with up to 8GB of GDDR5 memory. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M uses the Maxwell GM204 architecture and has 1536 CUDA cores. All of them operate at 1038MHz, but NVIDIA’s GPU Boost 2.0 can dynamically increase that frequency.

The graphics card has a 256bit bus and supports DirectX 11.2, Pixel Shader 5.0, Optimus, SLI, PhysX, OpenCL 1.1, OpenGL 4.4, DirectCompute, CUDA, Blu-Ray 3D and 3D Vision. Memory bandwidth is 160GB/sec. Max resolutions (WxH) are 3840×2160 digital and 2048×1536 analog.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M is a high-end graphics chip, announced on October 7, 2014. It will be available in models with up to 8GB of GDDR5 memory. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M uses the Maxwell GM204 architecture and has 1280 CUDA cores. All of them operate at 924MHz, but NVIDIA’s GPU Boost 2.0 can dynamically increase that frequency.

The graphics card has a 198-bit bus and supports DirectX 11.2, Pixel Shader 5.0, Optimus, SLI, PhysX, OpenCL 1.1, OpenGL 4.4, DirectCompute, CUDA, Blu-Ray 3D and 3D Vision. Memory bandwidth is 120GB/sec. Max resolutions (WxH) are 3840×2160 digital and 2048×1536 analog.

Specs sheet

	GTX 980M	GTX 970M
GPU	GM204	GM204
CUDA cores	1536	1280
Texture units	96	80
ROPs	64	48
Clock speed	1038 MHz	924 MHz
Memory	4GB GDDR5	3GB GDDR5
Memory bus	256-bit	192-bit
Memory frequency	5000 MHz	5000 MHz
Memory bandwidth	160 GB/s	120 GB/s
TDP	125W	100W

The clear winner will be the GTX 980M, without any doubt. The flagship features more CUDA cores, more texture units, ROPs, more memory and slightly wider bus width. Both graphics cards share the same GM207 GPU, but the GTX 980M’s core is clocked slightly higher, leading to higher energy consumption as well. But is it really worth the extra bucks as notebooks with the GTX 980M are significantly more expensive than the ones with GTX 970M. Let’s find out in the synthetic and gaming benchmarks below.