Which is better and why? Nvidia GeForce GTX 960M or 980 Ti

Please let me know.

What? Apples and oranges.

The 980 ti is a discrete desktop card, the 960m is normally used in laptops (or all-in-ones). Until the introduction of the 1080, the 980 ti was about as fast as the Maxwell Titan X, the fastest card nVidia made at the time.

The desktop 960 was more powerful than the 960m. (The 960 also consumes 128W peak or more, which would not be acceptable in a notebook.)

Sample benchmarks:

http://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare...0/m27242vs3609

http://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare...0/m27242vs3165

I suppose that Google can find more and better benchmarks, but I think that these are plausible.

There are three factors to look at with NVidia cards.

1) Processor Version
2) Clock Speed
3) Memory type/speed

Typically, the processor version comes in two major types, Mobile and Desktop. Then there are several subtypes (the numbered versions) which typically relate to how many Cores the GPU has. Different versions also have different clock speed ranges that are typically used, as well as various features supported.

As bobkn mentions, there is a huge difference between a mobile processor and a desktop, since mobile processors have to be energy efficient, while desktop processors don't care as much about that (although heat dissipation can be a common concern). This energy efficiency typically means a slower clock speed than an equivalent Desktop unit, as well more advanced power management features that shut down cores or even the whole GPU except when absolutely needed. There is also typically a difference in supported PCIe lanes.

Memory architecture and speed also plays an important role. As does base clock speed and boost speed (if the processor supports that).

The 960m is a midrange consumer mobile processor, you can see specs here for all the processors:

List of Nvidia graphics processing units - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is all an oversimplification, as there are also many other factors that make a difference between editions, but in general, if you're dealing with the same major version number (say 900 series as in this case), then a higher subversion number (60/80) means faster and better. Although "better" can be subjective since "lower power consumption" might make a GPU "better" to some wile "maximum performance" might be "better" to others.

Ultimately, the base GFLOPS rating will give you an idea of the power of each card.

960M = 1403 SP GFLOPS
980 TI = 5632 SP GFLOPS

As you can see, the 980 TI is roughly 4x more powerful, but this comes at the cost of a 250 Watt TDP while the 960M has a 65 Watt TDP. ie, it uses 4x as much power.

bobkn said:

What? Apples and oranges.

The 980 ti is a discrete desktop card, the 960m is normally used in laptops (or all-in-ones). Until the introduction of the 1080, the 980 ti was about as fast as the Maxwell Titan X, the fastest card nVidia made at the time.

The desktop 960 was more powerful than the 960m. (The 960 also consumes 128W peak or more, which would not be acceptable in a notebook.)

Sample benchmarks:

http://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare...0/m27242vs3609

http://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare...0/m27242vs3165

I suppose that Google can find more and better benchmarks, but I think that these are plausible.

Thank you.