NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 Max-Q vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 Max-Q 6 GB vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 4 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

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Specifications
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Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

1789 points

2262 points

26% slightly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

Volumetric ray casting test, a computationally expensive method of rendering high-quality scenes

37 FPS

47 FPS

10 FPS slightly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

30 FPS

35 FPS

5 FPS slightly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

25 FPS

31 FPS

7 FPS slightly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

23 FPS

28 FPS

5 FPS slightly higher Clouds frame rate

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

3292 points

3647 points

10% slightly higher 3DMark Graphics score

Blender score

Cycles Render (Samples per minute)

347.28 points

19% slightly higher Blender score

289.94 points

Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

CUDA compute benchmark

28312 points

9% slightly higher Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

25908 points

Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

29934 points

2% slightly higher Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

29153 points

Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

32085 points

34107 points

6% slightly higher Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

32446 points

10% slightly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

29277 points

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

29492 points

32348 points

9% slightly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1480 MHz

40% slightly higher core clock speed

1050 MHz

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1480 MHz

25% slightly higher boost clock speed

1178 MHz

Memory

Onboard memory size for textures and vertices

6 GiB

49% significantly more memory

4 GiB

Memory Bus Width

Number of parallel lines to the memory chips

192 Bit

256 Bit

33% slightly larger memory bus width

Memory Bandwidth

Data transfer speed between GPU core and memory

192.2 GB/s

224.4 GB/s

16% slightly higher memory bandwidth

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

80 W

81% significantly lower TDP

145 W

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

71.04 Gigapixels/s

7% slightly higher pixel rate

65.97 Gigapixels/s

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

118.4 Gigatexels/s

122.5 Gigatexels/s

3% slightly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

3.79 TFLOPS

3.92 TFLOPS

3% slightly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

1280

1664

30% slightly more shading units

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

104

30% slightly more texture mapping units

Render Output Processors

Number of processors dedicated to final pixel rendering

16% slightly more render output processors

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

222nd of 586

193rd of 586

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2017 June

2014 September

Memory Type

The type of memory used by this chip

GDDR5

DirectX Support

Maximum version of DirectX supported

12.1

12.0

OpenGL Support

Maximum version of OpenGL supported

4.5

GeForce GTX 1060 Max-Q vs GeForce GTX 970 benchmarks

In our benchmarks, the GeForce GTX 970 beats the GeForce GTX 1060 Max-Q in gaming performance.

The GeForce GTX 1060 Max-Q has a slightly higher core clock speed. This is the frequency at which the graphics core is running at. While not necessarily an indicator of overall performance, this metric can be useful when comparing two GPUs based on the same architecture. In addition, the GeForce GTX 1060 Max-Q also has a slightly higher boost clock speed: the maximum frequency the chip can reach if power delivery and thermals allow.

Furthermore, the spec sheet for both these GPUs show that the GeForce GTX 1060 Max-Q has significantly more memory with 6 GiB of memory compared to 4 GiB. Memory size doesn't directly affect performance, but too little memory will certainly degrade gaming performance.

In addition, the GeForce GTX 1060 Max-Q has a significantly lower TDP at 80 W when compared to the GeForce GTX 970 at 145 W. TDP (Thermal Design Power) measures total heat output from the chip.

In conclusion, all specs and GPU benchmarks considered, will recommend the GeForce GTX 970 over the GeForce GTX 1060 Max-Q.