In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti SLI are massively better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 MSI 2GB Edition.

The RTX 2080 Ti has a 223 MHz higher core clock speed and 208 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 960. This results in the RTX 2080 Ti providing 295.1 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 RTX 2080 Ti has a 223 MHz higher core clock speed and 56 more Render Output Units than the GTX 960. This results in the RTX 2080 Ti providing 82.7 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 RTX 2080 Ti was released over three years more recently than the GTX 960, and so the RTX 2080 Ti is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the GTX 960 when running the latest games.

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 RTX 2080 Ti has 9216 MB more video memory than the GTX 960, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the RTX 2080 Ti also has superior memory performance overall.

The RTX 2080 Ti has 503.8 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 960, which means that the memory performance of the RTX 2080 Ti is massively better than the GTX 960.

The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti SLI has 4352 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 960 MSI 2GB Edition has 1024. However, the actual shader performance of the RTX 2080 Ti is 7116 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 960 is 1628. The RTX 2080 Ti having 5488 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the RTX 2080 Ti delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GTX 960.

The RTX 2080 Ti transistor size technology is 16 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GTX 960. This means that the RTX 2080 Ti is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GTX 960.

The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti SLI requires 260 Watts to run and the GeForce GTX 960 MSI 2GB Edition requires 120 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 650 Watts for the RTX 2080 Ti and a PSU with at least 400 Watts for the GTX 960. The RTX 2080 Ti requires 140 Watts more than the GTX 960 to run. The difference is significant enough that the RTX 2080 Ti may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the GTX 960.