NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 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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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970

Price

The cheapest price from our partner retailers

$ 365.00

$ 4.00 slightly less expensive

$ 369.00

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

4905 points

116% significantly better overall score

2262 points

Flux Core frame rate

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

94 FPS

47 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

47 FPS

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

79 FPS

44 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

35 FPS

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

62 FPS

31 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

31 FPS

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

64 FPS

36 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

28 FPS

Free GPU Benchmark

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

7547 points

106% significantly higher 3DMark Graphics score

3647 points

Blender score

Cycles Render (Samples per minute)

606.98 points

109% significantly higher Blender score

289.94 points

Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

CUDA compute benchmark

51531 points

98% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

25908 points

Geekbench 5 (Metal) score

Metal compute benchmark

23824 points

75% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (Metal) score

13595 points

Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

54640 points

87% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

29153 points

Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

66552 points

95% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

34107 points

Geekbench 6 (Metal) score

Metal compute benchmark

23824 points

75% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Metal) score

13595 points

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

60120 points

105% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

29277 points

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

65170 points

101% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

32348 points

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1607 MHz

53% significantly higher core clock speed

1050 MHz

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1733 MHz

47% significantly 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

180 W

145 W

24% slightly lower TDP

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

110.9 Gigapixels/s

68% significantly higher pixel rate

65.97 Gigapixels/s

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

277.3 Gigatexels/s

126% significantly higher texture rate

122.5 Gigatexels/s

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

8.87 TFLOPS

126% 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

104th of 586

193rd of 586

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2016 May

2014 September

Memory Type

The type of memory used by this chip

GDDR5X

GDDR5

DirectX Support

Maximum version of DirectX supported

12.0

OpenGL Support

Maximum version of OpenGL supported

4.5

GeForce GTX 1080 vs GeForce GTX 970 benchmarks

In our benchmarks, the GeForce GTX 1080 beats the GeForce GTX 970 in gaming performance.

Our database shows that the GeForce GTX 1080 has a significantly 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 1080 also has a significantly higher boost clock speed: the maximum frequency the chip can reach if power delivery and thermals allow.

As stated by the manufacturer, the GeForce GTX 1080 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 970 has a slightly lower TDP at 145 W when compared to the GeForce GTX 1080 at 180 W. TDP (Thermal Design Power) measures total heat output from the chip.

In terms of raw gaming performance in our GPU benchmark, the GeForce GTX 1080 is better than the GeForce GTX 970.