NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 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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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970

Price

The cheapest price from our partner retailers

$ 335.00

$ 34.00 slightly less expensive

$ 369.00

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

2077 points

2262 points

8% slightly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

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

43 FPS

47 FPS

3 FPS slightly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

34 FPS

35 FPS

0 FPS slightly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

27 FPS

31 FPS

4 FPS slightly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

27 FPS

28 FPS

1 FPS slightly higher Clouds frame rate

Free GPU Benchmark

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

3636 points

3647 points

0.30% slightly higher 3DMark Graphics score

Blender score

Cycles Render (Samples per minute)

370.89 points

27% slightly higher Blender score

289.94 points

Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

CUDA compute benchmark

31129 points

20% slightly higher Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

25908 points

Geekbench 5 (Metal) score

Metal compute benchmark

13531 points

13595 points

0.47% slightly higher Geekbench 5 (Metal) score

Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

32388 points

11% slightly higher Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

29153 points

Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

31476 points

34107 points

8% slightly higher Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Geekbench 6 (Metal) score

Metal compute benchmark

13531 points

13595 points

0.47% slightly higher Geekbench 6 (Metal) score

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

32365 points

10% slightly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

29277 points

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

30916 points

32348 points

4% slightly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1708 MHz

62% significantly higher core clock speed

1050 MHz

Memory

Onboard memory size for textures and vertices

6 GiB

49% significantly more memory

4 GiB

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

120 W

20% slightly lower TDP

145 W

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

205th of 586

193rd of 586

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2014 September

Memory Type

The type of memory used by this chip

GDDR5

DirectX Support

Maximum version of DirectX supported

12.0

OpenGL Support

Maximum version of OpenGL supported

4.5

GeForce GTX 1060 vs GeForce GTX 970 specs and performance

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

Our database shows that the GeForce GTX 1060 has a significantly higher core clock speed. The core clock speed (or base speed) is the frequency at which the GPU core runs. This metric makes sense when comparing GPUs of a similar architecture or generation.

Furthermore, the spec sheet for both these GPUs show that the GeForce GTX 1060 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 has a slightly lower TDP at 120 W when compared to the GeForce GTX 970 at 145 W. Heat output doesn't match power consumption directly but, it's a good estimate.

In terms of raw gaming performance in our GPU benchmark, the GeForce GTX 970 is better than the GeForce GTX 1060.