In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 2GB SLI are noticeably better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 780.

The GTX 960 has a 264 MHz higher core clock speed than the GeForce GTX 780, but the GeForce GTX 780 has 64 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 960. As a result, the GeForce GTX 780 exhibits a 21.4 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the GTX 960. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The GTX 960 has a 264 MHz higher core clock speed and 16 more Render Output Units than the GeForce GTX 780. This results in the GTX 960 providing 30.7 GPixel/s better pixeling performance. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The GTX 960 was released over a year more recently than the GeForce GTX 780, and so the GTX 960 is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the GeForce GTX 780.

Both GPUs exhibit very powerful performance, so it probably isn't worth upgrading from one to the other, as both are capable of running even the most demanding games at the highest settings.

The GTX 960 has 1024 MB more video memory than the GeForce GTX 780, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the GTX 960 also has superior memory performance overall.

The GeForce GTX 780 has 64 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 960, which means that the memory performance of the GeForce GTX 780 is much better than the GTX 960.

The GeForce GTX 960 2GB SLI has 2048 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 780 has 2304. However, the actual shader performance of the GTX 960 is 3257 and the actual shader performance of the GeForce GTX 780 is 2078. The GTX 960 having 1179 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the GeForce GTX 780 performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The GeForce GTX 960 2GB SLI requires 240 Watts to run and the GeForce GTX 780 requires 250 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 550 Watts for the GTX 960 and a PSU with at least 600 Watts for the GeForce GTX 780. The GeForce GTX 780 requires 10 Watts more than the GTX 960 to run. The difference is not significant enough for the GeForce GTX 780 to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the GTX 960.