In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 4GB are significantly better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 950 LP MSI OC v3 2GB Edition.

The GTX 980 has a 50 MHz higher core clock speed and 80 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 950. This results in the GTX 980 providing 92.5 GTexel/s better texturing performance. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The GTX 980 has a 50 MHz higher core clock speed and 32 more Render Output Units than the GTX 950. This results in the GTX 980 providing 37.7 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 950 was released over a year more recently than the GTX 980, and so the GTX 950 is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the GTX 980.

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 980 has 2048 MB more video memory than the GTX 950, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the GTX 980 also has superior memory performance overall.

The GTX 980 has 118.6 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 950, which means that the memory performance of the GTX 980 is massively better than the GTX 950.

The GeForce GTX 950 LP MSI OC v3 2GB Edition has 768 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 980 4GB has 2048. However, the actual shader performance of the GTX 950 is 1299 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 980 is 3362. The GTX 980 having 2063 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the GTX 980 delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GTX 950.

The GeForce GTX 950 LP MSI OC v3 2GB Edition requires 75 Watts to run and the GeForce GTX 980 4GB requires 165 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 350 Watts for the GTX 950 and a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the GTX 980. The GTX 980 requires 90 Watts more than the GTX 950 to run. The difference is significant enough that the GTX 980 may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the GTX 950.