NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 4 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

$ 265.00

$ 104.00 significantly less expensive

$ 369.00

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

1419 points

2262 points

59% significantly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

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

29 FPS

47 FPS

17 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

22 FPS

35 FPS

13 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

20 FPS

31 FPS

12 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

17 FPS

28 FPS

11 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

Free GPU Benchmark

Want to compare your graphics card against the GeForce GTX 960 and the GeForce GTX 970? Download our free and quick PC Performance Test.

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

2293 points

3647 points

59% significantly higher 3DMark Graphics score

Blender score

Cycles Render (Samples per minute)

167.72 points

289.94 points

72% significantly higher Blender score

Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

CUDA compute benchmark

17784 points

25908 points

45% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

Geekbench 5 (Metal) score

Metal compute benchmark

8773 points

13595 points

54% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (Metal) score

Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

21072 points

29153 points

38% slightly higher Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

22380 points

34107 points

52% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Geekbench 6 (Metal) score

Metal compute benchmark

8773 points

13595 points

54% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Metal) score

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

19796 points

29277 points

47% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

20845 points

32348 points

55% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1127 MHz

7% slightly higher core clock speed

1050 MHz

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1178 MHz

Identical

1178 MHz

Memory

Onboard memory size for textures and vertices

4 GiB

Identical

4 GiB

Memory Bus Width

Number of parallel lines to the memory chips

128 Bit

256 Bit

100% significantly larger memory bus width

Memory Bandwidth

Data transfer speed between GPU core and memory

112.2 GB/s

224.4 GB/s

100% significantly higher memory bandwidth

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

120 W

20% slightly lower TDP

145 W

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

37.7 Gigapixels/s

65.97 Gigapixels/s

74% significantly higher pixel rate

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

75.39 Gigatexels/s

122.5 Gigatexels/s

62% significantly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

2.41 TFLOPS

3.92 TFLOPS

62% significantly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

1024

1664

62% significantly more shading units

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

104

62% significantly more texture mapping units

Render Output Processors

Number of processors dedicated to final pixel rendering

75% significantly more render output processors

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

239th of 586

193rd of 586

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2015 January

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 960 vs GeForce GTX 970 benchmarks

For gaming, the GeForce GTX 970 graphics card is better than the GeForce GTX 960 in our tests.

In our comparison, the GeForce GTX 960 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.

Next up, in terms of GPU memory, they both have the same amount of memory at 4 GiB. If you're planning at playing games at high resolutions with high-quality textures, you will need a lot of memory.

In addition, the GeForce GTX 960 has a slightly lower TDP at 120 W when compared to the GeForce GTX 970 at 145 W. This is not a measure of performance, but rather the amount of heat generated by the chip when running at its highest speed.

In terms of raw gaming performance in our GPU benchmark, the GeForce GTX 970 is better than the GeForce GTX 960.