NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 4 GB vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 8 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

Benchmark Score
Other Benchmarks
Specifications
Comments (0)
Popular Comparisons

GPU Comparison

Quickly search and compare graphics cards

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050

Price

The cheapest price from our partner retailers

$ 265.00

$ 229.99

$ 35.01 slightly less expensive

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

1419 points

3468 points

144% significantly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

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

29 FPS

82 FPS

53 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

22 FPS

41 FPS

19 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

20 FPS

59 FPS

39 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

17 FPS

31 FPS

14 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

Free GPU Benchmark

Want to compare your graphics card against the GeForce GTX 960 and the GeForce RTX 3050? Download our free and quick PC Performance Test.

Download GPU Benchmark

Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

2293 points

6224 points

171% significantly higher 3DMark Graphics score

Blender score

Cycles Render (Samples per minute)

167.72 points

1484.67 points

785% significantly higher Blender score

Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

CUDA compute benchmark

17784 points

72998 points

310% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

21072 points

71667 points

240% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

22380 points

56109 points

150% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

19796 points

63483 points

220% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

20845 points

62406 points

199% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1127 MHz

1552 MHz

37% slightly higher core clock speed

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1178 MHz

1777 MHz

50% significantly higher boost clock speed

Memory

Onboard memory size for textures and vertices

4 GiB

8 GiB

100% significantly more memory

Memory Bus Width

Number of parallel lines to the memory chips

128 Bit

Identical

128 Bit

Memory Bandwidth

Data transfer speed between GPU core and memory

112.2 GB/s

224 GB/s

99% significantly higher memory bandwidth

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

120 W

8% slightly lower TDP

130 W

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

37.7 Gigapixels/s

56.86 Gigapixels/s

50% significantly higher pixel rate

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

75.39 Gigatexels/s

142.2 Gigatexels/s

88% significantly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

2.41 TFLOPS

9.10 TFLOPS

277% significantly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

1024

2560

150% significantly 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

Identical

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

239th of 586

139th of 586

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2015 January

2022 January

Memory Type

The type of memory used by this chip

GDDR5

GDDR6

DirectX Support

Maximum version of DirectX supported

12.0

OpenGL Support

Maximum version of OpenGL supported

4.5

4.6

GeForce GTX 960 vs GeForce RTX 3050 comparison

For gaming, the GeForce RTX 3050 graphics card is better than the GeForce GTX 960 in our tests.

In our comparison, the GeForce RTX 3050 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 RTX 3050 also has a significantly higher boost clock speed. This is a frequency that can be reached if the GPU is cooled sufficiently and has enough power.

Furthermore, the spec sheet for both these GPUs show that the GeForce RTX 3050 has significantly more memory with 8 GiB of memory compared to 4 GiB. Lots of memory is good when playing at high resolutions or with many monitors.

In addition, the GeForce GTX 960 has a slightly lower TDP at 120 W when compared to the GeForce RTX 3050 at 130 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 RTX 3050 is faster than the GeForce GTX 960.

Comments

No comments yet! Be the first to leave a comment using the form below.

Latest posts

How to choose a power supply for your gaming PC: wattage and efficiency July 11, 2022

How to compare GPUs and GPUs: find the best components for gaming July 02, 2022

Best PC benchmarking tools 2022: how to performance test your gaming PC July 02, 2022

Popular GPU Comparisons

GeForce RTX 4070 vs GeForce RTX 5070

GeForce RTX 5080 vs GeForce RTX 5070 Ti

GeForce RTX 3060 vs GeForce RTX 4060

GeForce RTX 3050 vs Iris Xe

GeForce RTX 4070 vs GeForce RTX 5070 Ti

GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER vs GeForce RTX 5070

GeForce RTX 4060 vs Radeon RX 7600

GeForce RTX 4060 vs GeForce RTX 5060