NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Max-Q vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Max-Q 8 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

3375 points

49% significantly better overall score

2262 points

Flux Core frame rate

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

61 FPS

14 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

47 FPS

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

55 FPS

21 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

35 FPS

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

46 FPS

14 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

31 FPS

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

42 FPS

14 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

28 FPS

Free GPU Benchmark

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

5999 points

64% significantly higher 3DMark Graphics score

3647 points

Blender score

Cycles Render (Samples per minute)

558.71 points

92% significantly higher Blender score

289.94 points

Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

CUDA compute benchmark

46955 points

81% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

25908 points

Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

46870 points

60% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

29153 points

Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

58341 points

71% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

34107 points

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

49707 points

69% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

29277 points

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

58341 points

80% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

32348 points

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1468 MHz

39% slightly higher core clock speed

1050 MHz

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1468 MHz

24% slightly higher boost clock speed

1178 MHz

Memory

Onboard memory size for textures and vertices

8 GiB

100% significantly more memory

4 GiB

Memory Bus Width

Number of parallel lines to the memory chips

256 Bit

Identical

256 Bit

Memory Bandwidth

Data transfer speed between GPU core and memory

320.3 GB/s

42% slightly higher memory bandwidth

224.4 GB/s

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

110 W

31% slightly lower TDP

145 W

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

93.95 Gigapixels/s

42% slightly higher pixel rate

65.97 Gigapixels/s

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

234.9 Gigatexels/s

91% significantly higher texture rate

122.5 Gigatexels/s

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

7.52 TFLOPS

91% significantly better floating point performance

3.92 TFLOPS

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

2560

53% significantly more shading units

1664

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

160

53% significantly more texture mapping units

104

Render Output Processors

Number of processors dedicated to final pixel rendering

14% slightly more render output processors

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

141st 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

GDDR5X

GDDR5

DirectX Support

Maximum version of DirectX supported

12.1

12.0

OpenGL Support

Maximum version of OpenGL supported

4.5

GeForce GTX 1080 Max-Q vs GeForce GTX 970 benchmarks

For gaming, the GeForce GTX 1080 Max-Q graphics card is better than the GeForce GTX 970 in our tests.

In our comparison, the GeForce GTX 1080 Max-Q has a slightly 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. In addition, the GeForce GTX 1080 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 1080 Max-Q has significantly more memory with 8 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 1080 Max-Q has a slightly lower TDP at 110 W when compared to the GeForce GTX 970 at 145 W. TDP (Thermal Design Power) measures total heat output from the chip.

According to the results of the hardwareDB benchmark utility, the GeForce GTX 1080 Max-Q is faster than the GeForce GTX 970.