NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 4 GB vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M 3 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

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Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

1419 points

1446 points

1% slightly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

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

29 FPS

30 FPS

1 FPS slightly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

22 FPS

0 FPS slightly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

20 FPS

0 FPS slightly higher City frame rate

19 FPS

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

17 FPS

18 FPS

0 FPS slightly higher Clouds frame rate

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

2293 points

0.57% slightly higher 3DMark Graphics score

2280 points

Blender score

Cycles Render (Samples per minute)

167.72 points

206.38 points

23% slightly higher Blender score

Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

CUDA compute benchmark

17784 points

18285 points

2% slightly higher Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

21072 points

5% slightly higher Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

20012 points

Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

22380 points

2% slightly higher Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

21753 points

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

19796 points

1% slightly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

19440 points

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

20845 points

6% slightly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

19602 points

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1127 MHz

21% slightly higher core clock speed

924 MHz

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1178 MHz

13% slightly higher boost clock speed

1038 MHz

Memory

Onboard memory size for textures and vertices

4 GiB

33% slightly more memory

3 GiB

Memory Bus Width

Number of parallel lines to the memory chips

128 Bit

192 Bit

49% significantly larger memory bus width

Memory Bandwidth

Data transfer speed between GPU core and memory

112.2 GB/s

120.3 GB/s

7% slightly higher memory bandwidth

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

120 W

75 W

60% significantly lower TDP

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

37.7 Gigapixels/s

49.82 Gigapixels/s

32% slightly higher pixel rate

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

75.39 Gigatexels/s

83.04 Gigatexels/s

10% slightly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

2.41 TFLOPS

2.66 TFLOPS

10% slightly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

1024

1280

25% slightly more shading units

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

25% slightly more texture mapping units

Render Output Processors

Number of processors dedicated to final pixel rendering

49% significantly more render output processors

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

239th of 586

238th of 586

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2015 January

2014 October

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 970M specs and performance

In our benchmarks, the GeForce GTX 970M beats the GeForce GTX 960 in gaming performance.

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. In addition, the GeForce GTX 960 also has a slightly higher boost clock speed: the maximum frequency the chip can reach if power delivery and thermals allow.

Next up, in terms of GPU memory, the GeForce GTX 960 has slightly more memory with 4 GiB of memory compared to 3 GiB. Memory size doesn't directly affect performance, but too little memory will certainly degrade gaming performance.

In addition, the GeForce GTX 970M has a significantly lower TDP at 75 W when compared to the GeForce GTX 960 at 120 W. Heat output doesn't match power consumption directly but, it's a good estimate.

According to the results of the hardwareDB benchmark utility, the GeForce GTX 970M is faster than the GeForce GTX 960.