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Benchmarks aren't indicative of ingame performance. The 880m is still faster than the 965m. The 970m is faster than the 880m. The 965m uses a lot less power though, but ingame the 880m should still win, especially when overclocked. Some games they are surprisingly close though.
- Can you actually sustain those clocks for gaming? The difference in level of overclocking between the two cards in your comparison benchmark is quite substantial, but then again, the 965M has plenty of headroom for overclocking while I'd argue that the 880M is approaching its limits (for general gaming) once pushed north of the 1050 MHz mark, although I could be wrong on this count.
- You note that your card generally gets 10 frames per second more than the average benchmark for such a card in most games. I don't quite follow this because different games produce different net outputs. For example, one game may run at 30 fps on stock while another would run at 60 fps on stock, and as such, the same overclock across the two titles would yield two distinctly different gains rather than a static 10 fps. I could understand your card producing 20% greater performance, which translates into whatever frame rate we're discussing with respect to performance at stock clocks.
On that note, here is a Firestrike comparison, which runs at 1080p resolution.
I have a "good" 880M and it's a hot running card. I don't overclock it for games because as
@Kade Storm said, it doesn't have much head room. Keeping it cool is the hard part.
880m isn't notorious for overclocking and runs HOT. 965m is a good card, but the 128-bit bus just holds it back from it's full potential. However I don't think the 128-bit bus would limit performance at 1080p much. Beyond that, definitely, but it's probably borderline at 1080p. Beyond that you'd probably see a drastic drop off of performance.
kade: I meant on average. I understand a game may run 5-15fps faster than a stock 880m so i just put a figure in between of 10 on average
I can sustain 400/440 or 410/440 for gaming
I think my firestrike score (gpu) is the highest though 7461 but not gaming clocks I think i used 450/445 at 0.1mv+.Believe it or not but 87.5mv+ is the max overvolt thats stable.
I think they are tied if the 128bit bus doesnt hold the 965m back at 1080p gaming. given the 880m thermals and OC limits.
The 880M is a beast that cannot be tamed with laptop cooling... Definitely would have made some nice GTX 680 desktop cards but just too hot to run properly in a laptop. They were high ASIC, high leakage chips that ran low voltage at the expense of high temperatures. I had mine running 825MHz @ 0.85v to keep the thermal monster away... Although that low of a voltage being stable is rather impressive considering that Maxwell doesn't even like an idle voltage with the chip at 135MHz much under 0.85v
Right. I thought you were talking about games running 10 FPS faster on average when comparing your 965M at stock versus overclock settings. If it is beating the 880M by an average of 10 FPS, I think your curiosity may have already been sated.
As to your question. At 1080p, it would appear that with a generous overclock, the 965M more or less matches the 880M across the general board. Having that said, in some of the newer titles, where certain features might be more demanding, even stock-for-stock, the 965M manages to match the 880M, which I think might boil down to the benefits of the Maxwell architecture. It's quite a solid card and can get the job done at full HD resolution, even where its 128-bit memory bus might be seen as a shortfall. After all, back in the day (circa 2010 - 2011) the Radeon Mobility 5870 was quite a solid contender, despite the 128-bit bus and an overall similar bandwidth to other competing cards.
Agreed,
@Ethrem, and that's a relatively generous assessment of the card when compared to the generally dismissive reception it has received, and with good justification.
However, a slight digression on my part. I was under the impression that higher AISC quality meant lower leakage as opposed to higher leakage.
It's true in most cases but it isn't true in the case of the 880M. How else would you explain an 880M running the same clocks as a 780M at a lower voltage but a 10C higher temperature? Add to that the fact that you could undervolt almost all of them to have higher clocks than a stock 780M at a voltage meant for 2D clocks? There was something wrong with those chips. All of mine were over 80%, the only explanation I can think of is somehow those cores were high leakage and went against the general rule.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
