NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 4 GB vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 24 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

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NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090

Price

The cheapest price from our partner retailers

$ 265.00

$ 1284.99 significantly less expensive

$ 1549.99

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

1419 points

13991 points

885% significantly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

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

29 FPS

333 FPS

303 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

22 FPS

169 FPS

147 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

20 FPS

241 FPS

221 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

17 FPS

134 FPS

117 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

Free GPU Benchmark

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

2293 points

19931 points

769% significantly higher 3DMark Graphics score

Blender score

Cycles Render (Samples per minute)

167.72 points

5820.93 points

3370% significantly higher Blender score

Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

CUDA compute benchmark

17784 points

238123 points

1238% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

21072 points

204921 points

872% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

22380 points

138859 points

520% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

19796 points

194465 points

882% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

20845 points

179816 points

762% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1127 MHz

1400 MHz

24% slightly higher core clock speed

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1178 MHz

1695 MHz

43% significantly higher boost clock speed

Memory

Onboard memory size for textures and vertices

4 GiB

24 GiB

499% significantly more memory

Memory Bus Width

Number of parallel lines to the memory chips

128 Bit

384 Bit

200% significantly larger memory bus width

Memory Bandwidth

Data transfer speed between GPU core and memory

112.2 GB/s

936.2 GB/s

734% significantly higher memory bandwidth

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

120 W

191% significantly lower TDP

350 W

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

37.7 Gigapixels/s

189.8 Gigapixels/s

403% significantly higher pixel rate

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

75.39 Gigatexels/s

556 Gigatexels/s

637% significantly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

2.41 TFLOPS

35.58 TFLOPS

1374% significantly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

1024

10496

924% significantly more shading units

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

328

412% significantly more texture mapping units

Render Output Processors

Number of processors dedicated to final pixel rendering

112

250% significantly more render output processors

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

239th of 586

25th of 586

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2015 January

2020 September

Memory Type

The type of memory used by this chip

GDDR5

GDDR6X

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 3090 comparison

For gaming, the GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card is better than the GeForce GTX 960 in our tests.

Our database shows that the GeForce RTX 3090 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 3090 also has a significantly 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 RTX 3090 has significantly more memory with 24 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 significantly lower TDP at 120 W when compared to the GeForce RTX 3090 at 350 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 RTX 3090 is better than the GeForce GTX 960.