NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950 vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 950 is a mid-range graphics card for desktop PCs. It is based on the 28nm Maxwell GM206 chip and offers 768 shaders, 48 TMUs and 32 ROPs. The graphics memory is typically 2 GB GDDR5 with 6.6 GHz effective and a 128-bit interface.

As a novelty compared to the previous Maxwell GM204 chip, the GM206 includes the new VP7 video engine with HVEC (H.265) decoding and encoding. Furthermore, the GTX 950 supports HDMI 2.0 and HDCP 2.2 for 4K video output.

The 3D gaming performance of the GTX 950 is slightly better than the GeForce GTX 965M (33% more shaders but slower clock speed).

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 is a high-end desktop graphics card based on the second generation Maxwell architecture. The GM204 chip is manufactured in 28 nm at TSMC. Compared to the older GeForce GTX 780Ti, the 980 offers similar performance levels but at reduced average power consumption. The similarly named Nvidia Geforce GTX 980M for notebooks is based on the same chip, but uses less shader cores and slower clock speeds for reduced performance. Since end of 2015, the GTX 980 is also used in laptops (same chip with same clocks and branding).

The Geforce GTX 980 supports a range of unique features like CUDA, 3D Vision, PhysX, GeForce Experience, GameStream, GPU Boost 3.0, Adaptive Vertical-Sync / G-Sync, SLI, DSR, MFAA and Virtual Reality latency improvements.