NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 vs AMD Radeon Graphics (Ryzen 7000) vs AMD Radeon 610M

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 is a desktop graphics card of the upper middle class. It is based on the GM206 Maxwell chip that is produced in 28nm. The GTX960 offers 1024 shader cores, 64 TMUs and 32 ROPs (no deactivated units of the chip). The graphics memory is usually 2 or 4 GB GDDR5 (7 GHz effective clock) connected with a 128 Bit interface. 

On average the gaming performance is on a level with the AMD Radeon R9 280 and R9 285. Compared to laptop graphics cards, the 960 is slightly faster than a mobile Nvidia GeForce GTX 970M. The 970M offers more shader cores, but at a lower clock speed. The similar named GeForce GTX 960M for notebooks offers only 640 shader cores and a slightly lower core clock. The performance of the GTX 960 should be suffice for most games in full HD resolution. In our benchmarks only GTA 5 and The Witcher 3 achieved below 30 fps on average (see below for detailed benchmarks).

The GM206 supports CUDA, 3D Vision, PhysX, GeForce Experience, Surround, GameStream, GPU Boost 2.0, Adaptive Vertical Sync / G-SYNC, SLI, DSR, MFAA and Virtual Reality latency improvements. The GTX 960 also includes a H.265 capable de- and encoder as a first.

The power consumption of the GTX 960 on the desktop without load is around 10 Watt and on a similar level to the AMD counterparts. During gaming the 960 reaches around 85-100 Watt (depending on the model) which is a lot less than e.g. the Radeon R9 285 (around 170 Watt) - source tomshardware.com

AMD Radeon Graphics (Ryzen 7000)

The AMD Radeon Graphics of the Ryzen 7000 desktop CPUs is an integrated graphics card (iGPU) based on the RDNA 2 architecture. It offers only 2 CUs (128 shader) and is similar to the Radeon 610M. The clock speed in most CPUs ranges between 400 to 2200 MHz. Due to the low amount of shaders, the gaming performance is very low and only suited for low demanding games. The GPU also integrates an AMD Video Coding Engine (VCE) for H.264, H.265 10/8bpc encoding and AV1, VP9, H.265, and H.264 10/8bpc decoding.

AMD Radeon 610M

The AMD Radeon 610M is a pretty basic integrated graphics adapter that's found on many laptop as well as desktop AMD SoCs. It sports 2 RDNA 2 architecture CUs (128 unified shaders) running at a clock speed of up to 2.2 GHz. It can HW-decode many popular video codecs including first and foremost AVC, HEVC, VP9, AV1.

Performance

Its performance is close to what the Vega 6 and the 32 EU Iris Xe deliver. While this isn't a gaming GPU by any stretch of imagination, it actually is fast enough to run some competitive titles such as Counter-Strike 2 (~50 fps at 1080p / Low) as well as older (pre-2019) titles.

Power consumption

Considering how small the number of unified shaders and other components is here, the Radeon is unlikely to ever consume more than 10 W.